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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (58170)	1/30/2006 9:39:58 AM
From: ChanceIs	Respond to of 206281

Snowshoe - Thanks for tracking that down. I kicked a bit of a hornet's nest by casting so much doubt on that article. Still at best, we have that wind power will save 0.5 BCF/day over 13 BCF used for generation, or 3.8%, which is a far cry from 5%. The poorly worded WSJ article could be taken to mean - "to lessen its consumption of costly natural gas by 5%" - that we would save 5% of ALL daily consumption - which didn't pass the laugh test with me. Wind power is tricky. I know of some experts who suggest that wind power vastly increases the installed capital base, and can even INCREASE NG consumption. The problem all lies with the reliability factor and the fickle nature of wind. If we are going to use wind, and have people on kidney dialysis, we need to have backup electricity sources. Now do you construct a monstrously expensive but fuel efficient baseload plant to backup a windmill? You have to ask, how frequently is the windmill down. If the windmill is down 70% or so, then maybe the answer is yes. Who would bother building something which is down 70% of the time?? Now if the windmill is down 40% of the time, then you build a very inefficient, but cheap simple cycle (jet engine) gas unit. That might be fine in isolation. But what if you want to build six windmills, which would require one backup SS plant each? If you step back, you notice that the six SS turbines might be equivalent to one baseload plant, whereby you have made the windmills ineffective. I confess that ai haven't read many of these studies in detail. One has to know and understand the big picture, and there are all sorts of statistical games that can be played. Are windmills located next to existing large generations sources which can be used at backups?? How extensive is the grid?? Are distributors willing to buy from the windmills?? Is the wind data any good?? Clearly, vested interests can shade these studies very easily, so I haven't tried very hard to come to a deeper grip with them. I stand by my original skepticism that there is no way wind will replace 5% of total daily NG consumption.