It's not even true when it's windy and sunny. Repair costs for those fucking eyesore windmills is so high, that the liberal retards ignore it to try and make wind look cheaper. In real terms wind is by far the worst possible means of power generation, even if you choose to ignore the unreliability.
We'd be better off burning wood than using windmills.
From what I recall from reading about domestic installations, the issue is the inverter, to flip the DC voltage from the panels over to mains AC. Solar might be economical for a while, but once the inverter needs replacement you're basically look at most of the cost of the system all over again.
Windmills could at least potentially use an AC generator, but I presume there's other electronics in there, as otherwise you're looking at some weird mechanical system to force a windmill generator to run at 50Hz, matching phase to the grid. So again, expensive electronics boxes.
And that's before we get to the issue that windmills are basically impossible to recycle. Those massive aerofoil blades are tough, to the point that while it's theoretically possible to recycle them, hardly anybody bothers.
They HAVE to be tough, to be able to stay intact at heavy winds and to be able to keep decapitating birds without suffering too much structural damage.
From what little I understand, it's actually largely just really stupid stuff like grit and dust eroding the aerodynamic surfaces of the blades. No one bit of grit does a huge amount of damage, but those things are out in the weather all day every day, and that takes it's toll...
In seriousness, yeah, I don't doubt it. A bit like how most of the wear that appears on ship propellers actually comes from air bubbles that they create. (Cavitation)
I know an engineer that designs the blades and has worked on maintenance in the past too. They actually do use a mechanical system to regulate the speed on most modern windmills. There are brakes as well as mechanisms to adjust the pitch of the blades to gather more/less wind. If you see a bunch of windmills, watch, they are always the same speed.
The blades are mostly fiberglass and balsa wood. I'm not sure that many useful materials could be taken out of them. The posts are steel, but if I had to guess from my own industry they get abandoned in place when they are end of life. It likely costs more to decommission them than the materials are worth, and spending expense $ on such projects looks bad to pretty much any financial report for a public traded company, so it never gets done.
I'll have to ask sometime. I have a feeling that's one of those problems that seems complicated but would have some stupidly simple solution that would make me feel dumb for not thinking of it.
Generating 50 cycle electricity mechanically requires something to spin magnets near conductors at some multiple of 50 hertz.
That would require a complex mechanical drive, which would be both expensive and unreliable.
Instead it would be done with power electronics. MOSFETs and capacitors.
Capacitors are expensive and have a limited life. You replace the power electronics periodically and amortize the replacement cost over every watt generated.
It would be possible to design the power electronics to be reconditioned. That is the way it used to be done in the 60s and 70s. An older design like this would use huge, heavy coils, which last a long time and (depending on the design) can be re-wound.
DC power cannot be transmitted over long distances. This is the original problem that caused AC to win out.
There are two forms of load, inductive and resistive, and two corresponding types of power, reactive and real. If we use a rowboat analogy, real power can be thought of as the oscillation of the oars back and forth, while reactive power becomes the force of the oar pushing the water. Of course, the oars only push the water in one direction, then they're lifted and repositioned to push again.
In DC power, real and reactive power are indistinguishable. Voltage and current push in one direction all the time. It's only AC power where the rowboat analogy comes into play. So, WHY DO WE USE AC?
Simply, current cannot be made to flow over vast distances. We learned early on that you cannot transmit DC power over much more than a few miles without starting to suffer unacceptable transmission losses (we're not talking a few percent here; trust me on this, there's no solving THIS problem without cheap hot superconductors).
Now, both AC and DC motors require a net current in one direction (inductive load, satisfied by reactive power). But current can't be sent very far. So the solution is capacitors. In areas too far from a spinning generator to receive reactive power from the generator, utility scale capacitors are used to create local reactive power loops, satisfying the inductive load.
Some rubes at this point suggest making all load resistive, by putting capacitors in all your appliances. This is not practical. The people who are opposed to it are the insurance companies and their associates like UL. Capacitors... explode. And big ones require a lot more care than the tiny ones that drive your computer fans.
Not forgetting that voltage switching using DC is a royal pain in the butt.
Historically, the easiest way to do so was actually to covert DC to AC and then convert that AC to the desired DC voltage.
And this is important, because one of the things that makes grid power practical is the high-tension power lines that carry the stuff from the power plant to your neighbourhood. If the grid is AC anyway, it's comparatively simple to run an AC-AC transformer to step the voltage up to transmission voltage and then back down again at the other end, without having to worry about who's going to babysit the M-G sets you would have needed floating around all over the shop for a DC backbone.
These days I hardly ever see their logo anymore. Especially on Amazon products the only certification I see is ETL, though I assume it's the same rules as UL?
(often on cheap Chinese crap there is no certification at all)
I have a little solar setup on an outbuilding on my property and it made me think how at the very least it would be nice for a lot of things in my house. I can run any lighting, charging, 12V DC devices as much as I reasonably want all on a system that set me back less than $500 and has been operating a number of years with zero maintenance. It worked so well I've tapped into it for some of that 12V landscape lighting as well, just because the power was available and all I needed was a simple timer to make it work.
If I ever get bored enough, I might set up something similar to run always-on network devices in the house. When you take out the high powered stuff and focus on low current DC, solar is much more realistic.
Now if I ever could figure out HVAC, because that's probably 90% of my electricity anyway.
Stick a couple deep cycle batteries and a sufficiently large inverter somewhere in the power network and you can run appliances and power tools with it too. A 2000 watt modified sine wave inverter (good enough for light power tools, battery charging, etc) would run you like $160-180 and a pure sine wave inverter that you could use for computers and sensitive electronics is like $300.
That's awesome to hear. I am looking to put a well on my property and figure I could run the pump through solar, rather than digging up my garden to run a line. And like MLGS mentioned I was going to put a deep cycle marine battery in and use solar to keep it charged. As of now my only plans are to run radios during power outrages and the pump but it seems like I can really expand on that.
Window AC units have gotten pretty robust and remarkably low-power. Friend of mine had to cool his entire house when his main AC unit went out with just a single window unit, and it worked pretty well.
Gotta make sure you insulate the fuck out of your house, though. That's the real secret to minimizing power usage.
And after everything, I'll bet that in 100 years the headlines will read "POLLINATION CRISIS: Earth ecosystem collapses after wind flows blocked for 50 years"
More like "Pollination Change linked to gun ownership, Christianity; experts say that the world will end in 15 years unless the last remaining white people are put into camps"
It's worse than that. You can't get power from wind turbines when there's too much wind either. They have to lock the blades in position, lest they spin too fast and tear themselves apart. There are actually videos of this happening due to the brakes failing.
It's not even true when it's windy and sunny. Repair costs for those fucking eyesore windmills is so high, that the liberal retards ignore it to try and make wind look cheaper. In real terms wind is by far the worst possible means of power generation, even if you choose to ignore the unreliability.
We'd be better off burning wood than using windmills.
From what I recall from reading about domestic installations, the issue is the inverter, to flip the DC voltage from the panels over to mains AC. Solar might be economical for a while, but once the inverter needs replacement you're basically look at most of the cost of the system all over again.
Windmills could at least potentially use an AC generator, but I presume there's other electronics in there, as otherwise you're looking at some weird mechanical system to force a windmill generator to run at 50Hz, matching phase to the grid. So again, expensive electronics boxes.
And that's before we get to the issue that windmills are basically impossible to recycle. Those massive aerofoil blades are tough, to the point that while it's theoretically possible to recycle them, hardly anybody bothers.
They HAVE to be tough, to be able to stay intact at heavy winds and to be able to keep decapitating birds without suffering too much structural damage.
From what little I understand, it's actually largely just really stupid stuff like grit and dust eroding the aerodynamic surfaces of the blades. No one bit of grit does a huge amount of damage, but those things are out in the weather all day every day, and that takes it's toll...
In seriousness, yeah, I don't doubt it. A bit like how most of the wear that appears on ship propellers actually comes from air bubbles that they create. (Cavitation)
I know an engineer that designs the blades and has worked on maintenance in the past too. They actually do use a mechanical system to regulate the speed on most modern windmills. There are brakes as well as mechanisms to adjust the pitch of the blades to gather more/less wind. If you see a bunch of windmills, watch, they are always the same speed.
The blades are mostly fiberglass and balsa wood. I'm not sure that many useful materials could be taken out of them. The posts are steel, but if I had to guess from my own industry they get abandoned in place when they are end of life. It likely costs more to decommission them than the materials are worth, and spending expense $ on such projects looks bad to pretty much any financial report for a public traded company, so it never gets done.
Yeah, the constant-speed thing has been available since ... well, since steam engines, really, hasn't it? The early ones had regulators for that.
Matching the phase of the grid was the major bit of concern, unsure how you'd do that mechanically.
I'll have to ask sometime. I have a feeling that's one of those problems that seems complicated but would have some stupidly simple solution that would make me feel dumb for not thinking of it.
Generating 50 cycle electricity mechanically requires something to spin magnets near conductors at some multiple of 50 hertz.
That would require a complex mechanical drive, which would be both expensive and unreliable.
Instead it would be done with power electronics. MOSFETs and capacitors.
Capacitors are expensive and have a limited life. You replace the power electronics periodically and amortize the replacement cost over every watt generated.
It would be possible to design the power electronics to be reconditioned. That is the way it used to be done in the 60s and 70s. An older design like this would use huge, heavy coils, which last a long time and (depending on the design) can be re-wound.
DC power cannot be transmitted over long distances. This is the original problem that caused AC to win out.
There are two forms of load, inductive and resistive, and two corresponding types of power, reactive and real. If we use a rowboat analogy, real power can be thought of as the oscillation of the oars back and forth, while reactive power becomes the force of the oar pushing the water. Of course, the oars only push the water in one direction, then they're lifted and repositioned to push again.
In DC power, real and reactive power are indistinguishable. Voltage and current push in one direction all the time. It's only AC power where the rowboat analogy comes into play. So, WHY DO WE USE AC?
Simply, current cannot be made to flow over vast distances. We learned early on that you cannot transmit DC power over much more than a few miles without starting to suffer unacceptable transmission losses (we're not talking a few percent here; trust me on this, there's no solving THIS problem without cheap hot superconductors).
Now, both AC and DC motors require a net current in one direction (inductive load, satisfied by reactive power). But current can't be sent very far. So the solution is capacitors. In areas too far from a spinning generator to receive reactive power from the generator, utility scale capacitors are used to create local reactive power loops, satisfying the inductive load.
Some rubes at this point suggest making all load resistive, by putting capacitors in all your appliances. This is not practical. The people who are opposed to it are the insurance companies and their associates like UL. Capacitors... explode. And big ones require a lot more care than the tiny ones that drive your computer fans.
Not forgetting that voltage switching using DC is a royal pain in the butt.
Historically, the easiest way to do so was actually to covert DC to AC and then convert that AC to the desired DC voltage.
And this is important, because one of the things that makes grid power practical is the high-tension power lines that carry the stuff from the power plant to your neighbourhood. If the grid is AC anyway, it's comparatively simple to run an AC-AC transformer to step the voltage up to transmission voltage and then back down again at the other end, without having to worry about who's going to babysit the M-G sets you would have needed floating around all over the shop for a DC backbone.
These days I hardly ever see their logo anymore. Especially on Amazon products the only certification I see is ETL, though I assume it's the same rules as UL?
(often on cheap Chinese crap there is no certification at all)
You sure about that, bro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Admittedly, HVDC Transmission was not possible in the early 20th century when electrification was taking place. It is possible now.
HVDC Transmission is not at all suitable for suburb or street level power transmission.
I have a little solar setup on an outbuilding on my property and it made me think how at the very least it would be nice for a lot of things in my house. I can run any lighting, charging, 12V DC devices as much as I reasonably want all on a system that set me back less than $500 and has been operating a number of years with zero maintenance. It worked so well I've tapped into it for some of that 12V landscape lighting as well, just because the power was available and all I needed was a simple timer to make it work.
If I ever get bored enough, I might set up something similar to run always-on network devices in the house. When you take out the high powered stuff and focus on low current DC, solar is much more realistic.
Now if I ever could figure out HVAC, because that's probably 90% of my electricity anyway.
Stick a couple deep cycle batteries and a sufficiently large inverter somewhere in the power network and you can run appliances and power tools with it too. A 2000 watt modified sine wave inverter (good enough for light power tools, battery charging, etc) would run you like $160-180 and a pure sine wave inverter that you could use for computers and sensitive electronics is like $300.
That's awesome to hear. I am looking to put a well on my property and figure I could run the pump through solar, rather than digging up my garden to run a line. And like MLGS mentioned I was going to put a deep cycle marine battery in and use solar to keep it charged. As of now my only plans are to run radios during power outrages and the pump but it seems like I can really expand on that.
Window AC units have gotten pretty robust and remarkably low-power. Friend of mine had to cool his entire house when his main AC unit went out with just a single window unit, and it worked pretty well.
Gotta make sure you insulate the fuck out of your house, though. That's the real secret to minimizing power usage.
It is quite possible we will start using "high" voltage (everything is relative) DC like data centers.
Of course you know how sticky wiring is. Many outlets have not changed since electric lighting was invented.
And after everything, I'll bet that in 100 years the headlines will read "POLLINATION CRISIS: Earth ecosystem collapses after wind flows blocked for 50 years"
More like "Pollination Change linked to gun ownership, Christianity; experts say that the world will end in 15 years unless the last remaining white people are put into camps"
It's worse than that. You can't get power from wind turbines when there's too much wind either. They have to lock the blades in position, lest they spin too fast and tear themselves apart. There are actually videos of this happening due to the brakes failing.
Turbines and their blades cannot be efficiently recycled, and often end up being dumped and creating worse environmental hazards.
Same for solar panels.
https://youtu.be/WQicWEp9P-s
https://youtu.be/8fSv7lNo1eM