"If Taiwan can get to 25% renewables..."At best, that "IF" would be 138m high, and cover an area of 398km2 - about 45% bigger than Taipei City. (Onshore windfarms consisting of 2,478 Enercon E-126 turbines)
Alternatively, that "IF" would be large enough to encircle the coast of the entire island several times over. (Offshore windfarms, extrapolating from the "London Array" and the length of Taiwan).
In still another permutation, a mere 6.5% (let's be generous, assume significant technological improvement and call it 10%) of that "IF" would cover every inch of every rooftop of every kind of building in all of Taiwan's cities, major and minor. (Solar photovoltaic, based on the Lhuju plant in Kaohsiung County).
So, IF, you environmentalists can find a cure for your rectocranialitis, then perhaps you could start talking about a much smaller and practically affordable IF.
Clearly, wind is not the only source of renewable energy.
ReplyDeleteMany countries have already achieved well in excess of 25% production from renewables..
It is however, clearly the best (only if we're talking about the very largest onshore turbines - offshore is a joke). Hydro is possible but enormously expensive (as is geothermal) whilst solar just doesn't count on this scale. Biofuel incinerators I need to read up on a bit more... but my understanding is that they are generally not competitive with natural gas turbines. I have no objection to the use of renewables per se - I am merely pointing out that the economic and political costs, not just the financial costs, of investing too much in renewables will badly hurt a lot of people - and that this is totally unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteWhat is generally not reported about countries that generate 25% or more of their power from renewables is that they either get it from hydro, thermal or they import the rest.
ReplyDeleteDenmark the famous country for windmills that claims to generate 25% of its electricity from renewable energy generally fails to mention its rather large energy imports from Sweden which gets their energy from hydro and nuclear. If energy imports were taken in account, I believe their percent of renewables would drop, precipitously. Then you have green Iceland who uses all that geothermal derived energy for smelters, because electric arc furnaces use loads of juice. Smelting is not what anyone would call green.
A biofuel incinerator is called a wood stove. If and when electricity prices rise, expect a lot of them and a lot less trees as people swap out their time for cheaper heating options. In the UK, pensioners are burning books. The BP dividend cut didn't help either.
Okami - yes on all points, plus one more: Denmark's 25% of electricity production is equivalent in TW hours to <5% of Taiwan's electricity production. If its even lower than 25%, then that just goes to show how lame M's comparison is.
ReplyDeleteAnd actually, I like the Enercon E-126 and would love to see it built in large numbers in Taiwan just because I think it looks f*cking excellent and because it is a remarkable engineering achievement. The trouble is the scale of the land required and the implications that has for costs. The E-126 is actually very cheap on its own, but the landowners will absolutely screw you for it unless the State gets fascist on them, or unless they are subjected to market discipline.
Oh and I read up a little on biofuels last night. Taiwan's 7 million pigs would produce something close to 126 million litres of effluent per day, which, if we assume 60% of that can be digested into biogas and we further assume 60% of that will be methane... then we get somewhere in the region of 45 million litres of methane per day. Methane has a fuel value of between 950 to 1050 BTU per cubic foot. Let's go with the higher figure - that's about 3.7 Watt hours per 28.3 litres of methane. Extrapolate and you get a potential of about 5.7 MW hours per day. Run that through a gas engine with the generous assumption of 50% efficiency (in reality it may be closer to 40%) and multiply by 365... and we have 1,040 MW hours per year (i.e. <0.2% of the 58 TW hours needed if renewables are to make up 25% of total electricity production in Taiwan).
ReplyDeleteIs that about right?
Gomar gas, Michael Yon did a very informative post about it on his blog/website. They use it in Nepal and it can be a real life saver for trees.
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to give you that the Enercon E-126 is a wonderful piece of machinery, but has it had problems with noise and is it a cuisinart for bats and birds? Those are 2 large objections I have.
I seriously doubt you could get a pig manure processing plant built in Taiwan. I think one of the very large problems with it is the relative distribution of pigs on the island. Hauling manure costs money so if you centralized it your transportation costs go through the roof and if you decentralize it you run into cost issues due to land being so damn expensive. Earthquakes ruin the opportunity to use pipelines as no one wants pig shit spewing on their property. Taiwan also lost a lot of pigs and pork customers when it got hit with foot and mouth disease thanks to the rampant smuggling from China. It would actually work well for dairy farms though. I'll have to think it over.
"...but has it had problems with noise and is it a cuisinart for bats and birds?"
ReplyDeleteTo my knowledge - no and no. It has a blade diameter of 126m, so it'll have to turn fairly slowly.
"Hauling manure costs money so if you centralized it your transportation costs go through the roof and if you decentralize it you run into cost issues due to land being so damn expensive."
That's true, but if the rough math I did last night is correct, then the scale at which an anaerobic digestion plant and accompanying set of gas engines could generate electricity would be insignificant anyway. You could use it to power the street lamps in Hengchun and Kenting maybe, but that has little to do with the 25% target the environmentalists talk about.
mike
And yes - "gobar gas" - read that Michael Yon piece. The real benefit isn't the trees - it's freeing women from the drudgery of collecting wood, and thereby giving them back more of their time to invest in other economic activity.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help but give a childish little chuckle though - the thought of cooking food using, essentially, fart-gas! But I'd do it myself in their situation - without a second thought.
mike
Trees are important. It's a great socio-economic indicator of how well the local populace is doing. It also provides food, shelter and a means for other animals and plants to live.
ReplyDeleteOk, one of the things that bothers me about bio-fuels is how do you get enough energy into them that can produce a net energy gain when they are used. Sugar cane based ethanol can do it, but corn fails at it. Gobar gas just doesn't produce enough BTU's to get anywhere. It seems we are stuck with petroleum products made by the pressure of the earth for quite awhile. Nuclear is dead. No one is going to want to invest in nuclear after Japan's case. It's very easy to frighten people, not so easy to make them brave.
I saw a youtube of one of those nice slow turbines clip a condor that was using the updrafts to glide about. I believe for bats it really messes with their sonar. Bats are really good animals to have about.
"Trees are important. It's a great socio-economic indicator of how well the local populace is doing. It also provides food, shelter and a means for other animals and plants to live."
ReplyDeleteSure I don't disagree with any of that. Yet freeing women to spend more time on other things is, to my mind, the primary advantage because it goes a long way to making possible the socio-economic progress which the prescence of trees may, in certain circumstances, indicate.
"...how do you get enough energy into them that can produce a net energy gain when they are used."
Well the short answer is that the chemists and bio-engineers need to figure out a way to turn cellulose into glucose for fermentation. Until that happens I'd guess biofuels are more or less a dead end.
"Nuclear is dead. No one is going to want to invest in nuclear after Japan's case. It's very easy to frighten people, not so easy to make them brave."
I'm not buying that yet, and I despise the fact-free, scaremongering Left on this issue so much that I relish every opportunity to argue the case for nuclear and fossils against renewables.
"I saw a youtube of one of those nice slow turbines clip a condor that was using the updrafts to glide about."
Found it. The E-126 is bigger than the turbine in that clip, but those blades were fairly slow also so it's quite possible it would be a danger to birds.
"Bats are really good animals to have about."
Yes, but when the lights go out because of the environmentalists, then a Batman or two would be even better to have about.