Blow, Winds!

Has anyone looked into wind power for our canyons where the sundowners race through?

Great! So we'd need, what, 200 turbines to power homes in SB (city), maybe 300 for our 'metro' area? Requires land measured in square miles, not acres, where there are fairly steady winds. Top of the mountains, maybe? Sundowners would make lots of power, for a few hours on certain days - what about the rest of the time? But remember what a single citizen can do here - block any project indefinitely. There's a guy in one of the Dakotas that has stopped a huge windfarm project because it will spoil his view. And that's in the Dakotas. Imagine here.....

My Mantra: Clean coal, well designed and regulated nuclear, increased drilling, solar someday when solar cell and battery efficiency make sense, wind in the very few geographies where it can work.

Final question: what percentage of already built power-generating wind turbines are actually working?

Well reasoned argument, RCMeltzer.

A bone to pick, however: your first salvo is "Clean Coal." If you don't mind my asking, does that even exist?

Because I heard there were only two plants in the U.S.:

"In this country, most research focuses on coal gasification, which aims to remove CO2 and other pollutants before combustion. But only two power plants using the technology have actually been built in the United States, in Indiana and Florida, and the purpose of both was to capture sulphur and other pollutants. Neither takes the next step of capturing and storing the CO2.

They also manage to be online only 60 or 70 percent of the time, versus the 90-95 percent uptime required by the power industry. In Europe, researchers prefer post-combustion carbon capture. But the steam needed to recover CO2 from the smokestack kills the efficiency of a power plant. "

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp...

And even some proposed plants are being taken offline:

"Meanwhile, leading Democrats were up in arms over the Energy Department's recent decision to abandon the $1.8 billion FutureGen project in eastern Illinois, planned as the first coal-fired plant to capture and store harmful carbon dioxide emissions. Energy Department officials, unlike politicians, had to confront the spiraling costs of this fantasy."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

And so I thought maybe it's just a pleasant-sounding buzz word, rather than a real strategy:

""There is no such thing as clean coal," says James Hansen, NASA's expert on global warming, who says all coal plants, even TECO's, still emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide - the most threatening greenhouse gas."

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/20/eveni...

Well... let me know.

Hi, Binky. So if clean coal is an oxymoron, out it goes. In spite of the issues surrounding nuclear waste disposal and all the environmentalist fear-mongering, most of the world (70% of countries, I read recently) seem to manage to generate lots of electricity with nuclear with few problems. Good design, good regulation, frequent inspections by knowledgable inspectors seem to me to be a reasonable road to nuclear-generated electricity.

P.S.to whatphotosb: who said anything about birds?

Wondering about the winds in the Santa Barbara area? Take a look at CEC's "Blueprint" chapter on wind power. It has maps showing the intensity of the wind. (Sundowners aren't going to make it.)

http://www.communityenvironmentalcouncil...