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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (4069)	5/4/2006 4:08:11 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24210

The back of the envelope cost for Megawatt class Windmills is about $1 USD per Watt. (.54 GBP) To replace a 1GW power station with Wind would cost roughly $8 Bn USD Now I don't know if you've priced a new Nuclear Power plant lately, but a while back I Googled about to find out how much they cost. link Nuclear power's biggest problems are economic: it is simply no longer competitive with other, newer forms of power generation. The final 20 U.S. reactors cost $3 to $4 billion to build, or some $3,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt of capacity. By contrast, new gas-fired combined cycle plants using the latest jet engine technology cost $400-$600 per kilowatt, and wind turbines are being installed at less than $1,000 per kilowatt. In other words, Wind costs 1/4 to 1/3 per watt of installed nameplate capacity. Let's assume you are correct, and that the real ratio is 8:1 to handle the baseline load. That mans that you need to spend twice as much on windmills as you do on a Nuke Plant. Of course, it takes 7 to 10 years to complete a Nuke plant, and there is NO electricity for those years, and the interest on the loans to build the thing just keeps rising. Then once you have completed it, you need to fuel it, and we have only found about 50 years of good EROEI uranium, (At present use rates) and as the purity of the remaining ore goes down, the amount of fossil fuels to mine and refine it goes up. THEN, at the plant end of life, you have to decommission it and store the waste for several times longer than recorded human civilization. With a wind farm, you can begin electricity production as you add towers, and they economically pay for themselves in less than a year. There is no ongoing fuel cost, minimal downtime for maintenance, and when they wear out you can re-use the tower (Which is a significant portion of the cost) with a new generator and blades. If you want to decommission one, you show up with a crane and take it away to melt it down to make a new ones. The notion of thousands of windmills somehow seems to creep people out, but compared to the scars on the planet caused by our use of fossil fuels I'd choose them in a heartbeat. Besides, maybe if we saw them every day we'd be more aware of our energy use. theoildrum.com