Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/japanese-breakthrough-will-make-wind-power-cheaper-than-nuclea

by etruong42 • 15 years ago

183 88 15 years ago

unwind• 15 years ago

Annoying article, it talks more about the (in my opinion very naïve and utopian) ramifications about the technology if implemented on a massive scale, than about the technology itself.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/lens-wind-turbines-magnify-po... is marginally better (and more brief), I'm sure there are further sources.

sbt• 15 years ago

I'm confused. The discovery article says "Each Lens, which measures 112 meters in diameter, can provide enough energy for an average household." Does that mean we need millions (or even billions) of these structures?

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Article says we'd need "about 2,640,000".

MediaBehavior• 15 years ago

So the diameter more than the width of a football (NFL) field. And... one of those per each household? Besides the visual obstruction, just finding such space for each abode is daunting anywhere (not to mention somewhere with the population density of Japan).

EDIT: Or, consider the transmission costs from areas where such land is available.

trebor• 15 years ago

I've heard that wind turbines currently are dangerous/lethal to many birds. If we widely deploy a great many "wind lenses" or normal turbines we'd see a substantial loss in bird population.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I wouldn't say "substantial loss", unless there were a truly gigantic number put out there. Currently, wind turbines kill approximately 0.01% as many birds annually as household pets do (around 60k-80k birds annually in the United States for windmills, versus 500m-700m for pets). So, regulating outdoor pets would be a better place to start if we were truly worried about bird populations. Second place to start would be buildings with plate glass, which kill around 100m. Numbers in the tens of thousands are pretty small as an additional factor.

onemoreact3• 15 years ago

Buildings/Windows are far more dangerious to birds than windturbines. It's really an order of magnatude problem where people see X deaths per year per turbine and think that's bad and ignore far more significant issues like domestic house cat's. For comparison consider well over 1 billion, aka 1,000,000+k birds die a year vs ~80k from wind turbines.

parfe• 15 years ago

More than one billion birds die a year from building strikes.

1,000,000,000 birds. I hope that puts "green" technology's impact in perspective.

http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf

http://www.birdsandbuildings.org/index.html

And that's just in the US.

rauljara• 15 years ago

The article itself has almost no information on the actual technology. The embedded video is much more helpful, and explains how the "lens" around the turbines helps to disperse air and create a low pressure zone on one side of the turbine. The relatively higher pressure air on the other side naturally wants to push through, greatly increasing the efficiency of the turbines.

datromero• 15 years ago

So in theory, this "wind lens" could be applied to existing wind turbines.

mooism2• 15 years ago

Would be helpful if it said on what basis it will make wind power cheaper than nuclear. Cheaper maximum generating capacity? Cheaper raw per watt cost? Cheaper per watt cost even after taking into account the extra power storage capacity wind power requires?

illume• 15 years ago

Yeah, you are right. There are many variables that need to be defined first.

How much does it cost to put nuclear power generation in a house? You can't. So therefore wind power is infinitely cheaper than nuclear.

If you put a wind turbine on the side of a building where that side forms a wind tunnel, then you can generate power very cheaply - if you only count the cost of the generator and the batteries. If you count the cost of the building that makes the natural wind tunnel and repairs it is more.

Same with nuclear - you need to count other costs. The cost of a rare accident is billions or trillions. The cost of cleanup, ruined nearby industries ( and even not so nearby industries (Wales farmers)) can be massive.

Wind power can be used without storage depending on what needs to use the wind power. Like the article mentions, car batteries are quite useful to store the power in. There are many uses for electricity that do not require continuous electricity. Likewise it can be used as a complementary source of renewable energy. There are communities that generate 100% of their energy from renewable sources, and part of that is from wind.

Wind is also a cheaper investment. Nuclear costs a lot of money initially, and on an ongoing basis. At a small scale, I can buy a portable wind generator for my ipod for under $30. At a large scale, some communities have farms that generate 5 gigawatt hours a year.

How do you price the cost to the environment of wind farms? Noise pollution, and visual pollution. The cost of safety - that is damage to human and animal life. Wind power causes the lowest amounts of death to humans, but apparently causes bird deaths.

It's all very complicated, but wind power does have some clear cost advantages. From scale of investment required, to safety cost advantages, to reduced environmental cleanup costs, to reduced tourism and land price effects.

brudgers• 15 years ago

"Cheaper than nuclear" until the environmental impacts are mitigated. One turbine every forty acres times 2.6 million is likely to comprise a significant change on a massive scale...before considering the support infrastructure.

jsvaughan• 15 years ago

Direct from the University:

http://www.riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp/windeng/en_aboutus_detail04.h...

"Wind power is proportional to the wind speed cubed. If we can increase the wind speed with some mechanism by utilizing the fluid dynamic nature around a structure, namely if we can capture and concentrate the wind energy locally, the output power of a wind turbine can be increased substantially. At wind energy section of Kyushu University, a new efficient wind power turbine system has been developed. This system has an diffuser shroud at the circumference of its rotor to embody the wind energy concentration. The diffuser shroud is now named "Wind lens". To apply the wind-lens structure to a larger size turbine, we have developed a compact collection-acceleration device"

michaelcampbell• 15 years ago

They had me until "nuke-u-lar".

Still, I'm all for these sorts of technologies. I hope it works. Now we need to work on STORING this energy efficiently.

coldarchon• 15 years ago

not only that. Every year in Germany 150.000 birds and bats are hit by the wings of wind turbines. Not good ..

DougWebb• 15 years ago

How much would it cost to buy the equiivalent of 25% of Alaska and then build 2.6 million huge turbines? From the pictures, these turbines look like they use a lot more material than current turbines because of the huge ring around them, so they're probably a lot more expensive.

Add to this the costs of reworking the power grid to distribute power from the new turbines across the country, and decommissioning all of the existing power generating facilities.

I doubt the turbines could ever recover their costs before they get worn out and need replacement.

mjallday• 15 years ago

i'd love to see cost breakdowns, especially once you include external costs such as environmental disasters

damoncali• 15 years ago

I think a friend of mine in the business told me a while back that a 1MW turbine was about $1M (if someone could verify this, that would be helpful). That's just the turbine. He also said that one of the biggest problems in getting a wind farm up and running was the procurement of those turbines, which are in short supply due to the uncertain financial future of wind power. Nobody wants to invest in the manufacturing infrastructure only to have the government yank the profitability of the industry by canceling the tax incentives. Keep in mind that people are building farms on the order of 300MW - way, way smaller than the millions mentioned in the article.

You also need the right kind of wind patterns. It's not as easy as buying 1/4 of Alaska. You need to look at the wind speed distributions over time and pick a certain set of conditions to make it work.

Symmetry• 15 years ago

Alaska is pretty darn far away, so much so that I'd expect that with conventional distribution systems you'd be losing over 90% of the energy.

alttag• 15 years ago

I think those not familiar with the size of Alaska (particularly from the "lower-48") might conceptually think of it as about the size of Texas. 'Tis not so.

20% of the size of Alaska is roughly the size of two or three full Midwest states. 20% of AK is about 132K sq miles, equivalent to about 80% the size of California (total ~164K sq miles).

http://www.google.com/search?q=alaska%20size%20compared%20to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_area_compared_to_co...

One of the insights from the video (and not mentioned in the article) is the option of using ocean area for wind collection, rather than doing it on land.

Duff2• 15 years ago

"Cheaper than nuclear" is a great pitch -- you can always adjust upward!

Does "nuclear" strictly mean operating costs? Or does it include the billions of government capital investments? How about storing waste for a period of time longer than recorded human history?

iwwr• 15 years ago

Storing nuclear material ('waste') is only a problem because it's not processed or exploited economically. Well, with the thorium cycle there is the possibility of burning a large proportion of existing waste and with electricity generation on the side.

This material can also be 'downblended' (the opposite process of enrichment) or simply mixed in with sea water in very small concentrations. Being long-lived radioactive sources also means the relative radioactivity (per volume) is low.

Duff2• 15 years ago

Sure, but as a competitor to this technology, that's just more to add to the cost.

It will cost many billions of dollars to develop infrastructure to "downblend" waste products, build thorium reactors, litigate, etc.

nosse5• 15 years ago

"How about storing waste for a period of time longer than recorded human history?"

How about naturally occurring uranium? Isn't it just as unsafe as nuclear waste, it radiates too you know. You just need lot's of it to be dangerous.

Now let's assume that we have 1 sievert natural occurrence of uranium. Then let's assume we have ten times as bad pile of nuclear waste, so it emits 10 sieverts. Now, let's bury that waste in ten different locations, and it's no more dangerous as natural occurrence.. Am I right?

Let's then wind 100 years to the future. Unsurprisingly the natural occurrence radiates somewhat less than it did. And any one of our ten hideouts of radioactive waste radiates less than the natural hideout, because they originally had relatively big percentages of isotopes with half-lives less than 30 years.

If you just put the waste back where you took it in the first place what's the problem? (there are abandoned coal mines and mineral mines too, so there should be enough places).

JacobAldridge• 15 years ago

Based on a tumbling-domino-theory of assumptions, this could be excellent. I particuarly like the fact that this new technology will be the answer to current unemployment because of the maintenance jobs it will create ... presumably, overnight.

nosse5• 15 years ago

Also we get rid of those dangerous mines. Why they are dangerous? People have to work there.

Luckily wind-turbine building and maintenance is not dangerous...

pingswept2• 15 years ago

People have been working on shrouded wind turbines for decades. Over and over again, the shrouds end up costing more than the cost of extending the blades and tower enough to capture the equivalent amount of wind.

I won't say that it will never work, but the list of failures is so long that anyone who mentions shrouded wind turbines without mentioning their history of failure should be suspected of being clueless. Inventing a new name for them, like "wind lens," makes them even more suspect.

For a weak census of recent attempts, see Google Image Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=ducted+wind+turbines

1868, Ernest Bollee in France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89olienne_Boll%C3%A9e

1926, Dew Oliver, San Gorgonio Pass in California, USA: http://books.google.com/books?id=7M9C1Adp0yQC&pg=PA46...

("The abandoned [Oliver] turbine remained at the top of San Gorgonio Pass for almost two decades until it was dismembered for its scrap metal during World War II.")

2005, Enflo turbine, still trying in 2011: http://www.enflo-windtec.ch/

2007, FloDesign: http://fdwt.com/ $56M in funding so far.

2008, Marquiss Wind Power: $1.3M Series A in 2008, now dead: http://www.marquisswindpower.com/

To be fair, Enflo and FloDesign haven't failed yet, or at least their websites are still up.

Gravityloss3• 15 years ago

Exactly this.

Wind power seems to be an area where the usefulness inversely correlates with spreading of a piece of news.

3 times the power of a conventional turbine? Albert Betz would like to have a word with these Japanese inventors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz_law

If anybody's interested in improving wind turbines, they should look at what is costly in current turbines. It's surprisingly the steel tower that's the most expensive part.

bartonfink• 15 years ago

I think this is what you meant to quote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27_law

mikeash2• 15 years ago

Are current turbines already within a factor of 3 of Betz' law, or at least within a factor of 3 of a practical limit?

D_Alex2• 15 years ago

Shrouds do two things: 1) they improve the efficiency by reducing tip vortex losses; 2) they increase the effective diameter of the turbine, so Betz' law is circumvented to SOME degree.

I worked for a time on shrouded propellers for ship propulsion and studied ducted propellers for aircraft. These are more efficient than unshrouded propellers - but in each case the difference is under 10% - this is combined gain from reduced losses and larger apparent diameter. With turbines, things are a bit more complex, because with a well designed duct you achieve an effective diameter actually larger than the duct itself, and capture the additional wind energy from that extra area. Taking things to absurdity, I am fairly sure (without doing the math...) that you could have a relatively small turbine inside an enormous duct, and achieve 3x the power of an unshrouded turbine of that diameter. But this is a poor solution, because the large duct will surely cost a lot more than a larger conventional wind turbine.

illumin8• 15 years ago

Please excuse me, I am not well educated on wind turbines, however, wouldn't it be beneficial, once you have extended the blades and tower as much as possible, to still use a shroud? After all, there is a finite amount of space between turbines and the ground, and you cannot make the towers infinitely tall.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that as long as the shroud or "wind lens" costs less than the price of building a second tower, it would seem that a 2x or greater increase in power output would be preferable to building a second tower, once you have increased the blade and tower height to the maximum efficient length.

Gravityloss3• 15 years ago

As much as possible would probably mean a 600 m high turbine with 300 m blades made of pure carbon fibre or something like that. That could cost hundreds of millions and would be a useless monument.

Look, it's a simple cost trade - currently the most economical turbines are in the 1 to 3 megawatt range and roughly 100 m rotor diameter.

Tower cost is probably exponentially related to height for example. so the things balance out at that point.

synnik3• 15 years ago

I'm doing my own renewable energy startup right now, with our own innovations in turbine design. And while the engineering is critical, it is not the problem with the industry.

Energy startups fail primarily due to a lack of appreciation for the intensive capital required to make renewable energy work.

This is an industry where every project will cost millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, or even a billion for truly large-scale operations.

And that is EVERY project. You do not just come up with a design, test it, then repeat it 500 times. Each site has its own unique properties, each turbine need to be manufactured and shipped, connected into a grid, operated and maintained.

So you need a permanent source of massive amounts of cash to operate. Your standard VC firm normally is not an option because the ROI is likely to be 10 years out, and that is too long for most investors.

When the ROI does come in, it is massive. But this is a high-risk, long-term play, and it just doesn't match the interest of most VCs.

We have built our first production units, field tested them, and are ready to roll, but have spent the last 3 months lining up finances because we do not want to be another failed company added to the list.

acangiano• 15 years ago

This is an area where I think government should provide generous grants and investments. Innovation for this type of problem is possible, but it takes more than 2 guys in a basement. Plus, as you mentioned, few VCs will want to wait a decade to see the results. Government can wait, however.

I'm not in the field, so I'll naively ask: Is the US government, or any government for that matter, doing anything about it?

chernevik• 15 years ago

Plus, you get power when the wind blows or the sun shines -- and none when they don't. Given the mean and standard deviation of cash flows, you can figure the proper debt to equity mix. But how well does the industry support that information for a particular project? Natural gas plants have very stable output so are more easily levered up. In a capital intensive industry, that's a very serious financing disadvantage.

This financing problem reflects a real economic problem. Risk -- cash flow variability -- is a real economic quantity. Failure to manage it causes real economic hardship and loss. If 50% of the power supply is wind, and it's down due to weather, someone on the grid is going down. Economically, the financing problem signals the importance of addressing that contingency. So this isn't just bankers being mean.

riledhel• 15 years ago

You have a blog or something so we can follow your progress? Wish you the best.

jackfoxy• 15 years ago

Investment requirement for each project is huge. Check. ROI is 10 years out. Check. When (if?) ROI comes in it is huge. Check. Hmm...sounds a lot like the oil business.

MaysonL• 15 years ago

Have you talked to Steve Jobs? Apple's cash flow would seem to fit your requirements perfectly.

toobig• 15 years ago

Anyone here familiar with or suffer from megalophobia? The "wind lens" on these seems to somehow aggravate my very mild case more than normal turbines do. While I hope for the success of this tech, I don't relish the idea of driving past a field of them at all.

skittles• 15 years ago

The article mentions this in passing, but wind energy tends to be exactly wrong for the daily increase of electrical load. As the sun rises and temperatures increase, the wind tends to die down. That's why storage was mentioned. That's probably a more important problem to solve: how do we efficiently store energy produced now for later?

ams6110• 15 years ago

Of course this assumes the concurrent deployment of a nationwide Smart Grid that could store and disburse the variable sources of wind power as needed using a variety of technologies — gas or coal peaking, utility scale storage via batteries or fly-wheels, etc

That parenthetical comment, dismissed with the lead-in "Of course..." is actually itself a huge technological hurdle that is decades away from reality.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

I drove across western New York this weekend and saw a few large wind farms. I found the view was quite pleasant and made a point to stop the car near the base of one to listen for noise -- I heard nothing above the background.

Wind's got two big problems. The power isn't where you want it in time and space. The wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind turbines need to be supported with "peaking" power plants which will almost certainly burn natural gas. Any effort to store power is likely to be as expensive as generating it. Another problem is that good wind resources aren't close to demand, so a large network of new power lines need to be built to get power into cities. Power companies aren't excited about this, because the power isn't available at the times they want it, and NIMBYism makes it quite hard to acquire new rights of way for power lines.

As for a comparison to nuclear, that's a comparison that can come out any way you like. Nuclear fuel is almost free, compared to the capital costs of building the plant. When you try to charge that cost to a kWh of electricity, it all depends on the lifetime of the plant and the cost of capital. For a while it seemed that nuclear plants have a longer life than we anticipated they would, which lowers the cost of electricity a lot. The Fukushima accident will probably cause people to give up on older BWRs, which hurts the economics.

In the past, the construction of nuclear plants has proven to be risky and unpredictable -- often nuclear plants cost many times more to build than originally planned. If the industry is going to have a future, it's going to need to answer this problem through technology (small modular reactors) and management (project management, quality control.)

khafra• 15 years ago

I've seen some content-free articles, but this one really takes the vapor-cake. It spends two sentences very nonspecifically talking about a technical development in wind energy, then paragraph after paragraph waxing rhapsodic about the wonderous world of the future that awaits us.

tintin• 15 years ago

The video tells it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifF-MOuzM_s

I think this is also a great example for startups. When things don't go as planned (nuclear disaster) don't give up innovating.

DennisP2• 15 years ago

He brushes off "utility-scale storage" but to actually power the country with wind, storage is a big problem. He mentions batteries. The cheapest battery is lead-acid. Here's an estimate of just how much lead it would take to run the country on lead-acid batteries: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...

Short answer: 50 times more lead than exists in known deposits, and $25 trillion dollars.

That's probably an overly pessimistic estimate. He assumes that we have to handle the wind stopping all over the country for a week (or, equivalently, going down to 30% for ten days). But I think it makes the point that renewables can't take over until we figure out scalable storage.

I did see one interesting idea: go someplace with lots of solid granite bedrock. Carve out a giant plug and store power by using hydraulics to raise the plug. http://www.solarserver.com/solar-magazine/solar-energy-syste...

That article says claims that "an analysis of a future of renewable energy shows that a mix of wind and solar energy needs, at least, a two day storage capacity." With that assumption, two plugs of 500m radius and 1km deep could handle all of Germany, at a cost of half a euro per kWh.

On the other hand, my ex-geologist brother was fairly sceptical of this idea.

rdtsc• 15 years ago

Doubt lead batteries would work on this scale. Other solutions: pump water up into some mountain reservoir (simlar to the granite plug idea), actually they already do this, they can run some hydroelectric power plants in reverse. Compress air into some airtight undeground chamber. Or even use giant gyroscopes to store energy for a short period (maybe night vs day type scenario).

DennisP2• 15 years ago

Yep. The question though is, how much hydropower can you actually build? How much volume is available in abandoned mines and so on, or what would it cost to dig out new ones just for this? A lot of things sound great, until you actually work out the cost and maximum capacity.

motters• 15 years ago

Japan is also well positioned to make use of hydrothermal. All those vents along fault lines pushing out superheated steam is currently unused.

shazam• 15 years ago

The technology could be interesting, but this article is painful to read.

"One downside often cited by advocates of coal and gas power is that wind turbines require a lot more maintenence than a typical coal or gas power plant. But in a lagging economy this might just be wind power's biggest upside — it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs, sparking a new cycle of economic growth in America."

He thinks the fact that they require more maintenance and are less efficient is good for the economy. Unbelievable.

16BitTons• 15 years ago

It is a tempting mistake to make. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Anything that increases the cost of energy will decrease the ability of a civilization to advance.

compoundBLING• 15 years ago

the title of this link is misleading. "will" should be replaced with "could".

spenrose• 15 years ago

See also: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20110613232554data_trunc_sy... . More broadly, the piece has a crude understanding of the complex issues around energy and cost.

beefman• 15 years ago

Conventional turbines are already near the Betz limit - no room for tripling their efficiency. There's potential to reduce the amount of material required (e.g. kite-based systems like those proposed by Makani), but this design doesn't look like it will deliver that. So something is probably wrong with the reporting here, to say nothing of the fluff written around the story (deploying 2.6M giant steel structures without causing any deaths?). So how the heck did it get 125 points?

jff2• 15 years ago

An oil pipeline across Alaska? Eeeeevil. Clearing out hundreds of thousands of square miles and covering them in turbines? The future!

colanderman• 15 years ago

You do realize most wind turbines are installed in land that's already cleared, such as farmland or the ocean, right?

gfodor• 15 years ago

I always have to laugh when wind advocates are forced to get to the point and explain how many wind turbines they're actually going to need. Yes, a 200k square mile patch of land with 3 million wind turbines isn't an indication that perhaps this isn't quite the right approach to solving our energy needs. It's just plain absurd.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

I thought the problem with wind wasn't the cost, it was that all the places with both consistent wind and no migratory birds that will get your project killed have been taken?

nosse5• 15 years ago

Wikipedia already has an article about the phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_lens

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Wind and solar power can never make up the bulk of base load power production on their own. They produce power on their own schedule, not based on when it's needed. Until we have vastly more efficient energy storage systems these will forever be niche power sources. They aren't entirely useless, but they are still 2nd or 3rd string, and this sort of innovation (increasing capacity and efficiency) won't change that.

vilda• 15 years ago

The article is badly one-sided. Some misconceptions were already mentioned, here are more which comes to my mind:

"Of course, this assumes the concurrent deployment of a nationwide Smart Grid that could store and disburse the variable sources" -> the price is extreme and not calculated. Furthermore, you would still need 100% backup in traditional sources.

"it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs" -> therefore badly increases the price of the power generated

"projected growth in electric vehicles" -> thus further increasing the demand for electricity

Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear

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