Consider these costs as you amble through life

Most people don’t buy so much as bubble gum without asking, “How much does it cost?” So for your amusement I have assembled a list of costs arranged in an order that you may find entertaining. Hopefully, you’ll find the apples-to-oranges juxtapositions equally interesting. A tip of the hat for the idea goes to former collague and mentor the late Ronald Khol.

Readers are invited to make what they will of the figures assembled here. These bits and pieces have been collected in a file for over a year and I have not kept track of their original source, although YouTube provided useful historical perspectives. What would you add?

Talley of the amount invested in U.S. wind projects over last 10 years: $128 billion. Next generation wind technology R&D by 2026: $36.9 billion. Expected worth of steam-turbine market by 2020: $19.3 billion. Global airport security market by 2023: $12.72 billion. Market worth for wind-turbine composites by 2021: $12.17 billion.

IRS evaluation of Michael Jackson’s estate: $434 million. Estimated cost to decommission a nuclear reactor in France: $322 million/GW or $322,000/MW. Cost for five wind turbines and their installation at Block Island: >$250 million. Stock bonus to Glenn Kellow, coal exec who led Peabody Energy (a coal company) through bankruptcy: $15 million.

Offshore wind rights for Kitty Hawk, NC: $9 million. Dynamic positioning device for a wind-turbine barge: $7.7 million. A prize fund for African renewable-energy projects: $7 million. Estimated cost to launch one offshore turbine with novel construction barge: $6.9 million. Amtrack locomotive: $6.5 million. NY fund for clean-energy education: $5.5 million. One 1.5 MW GE 1.5sle: $3.37 million. Rule-of-thumb costs for land-based turbine: $2 million/MW.

Amtrack passenger car: $400,000. Gearbox replacement and crane callout: $244,000. One WWII B17 in 1945: $238,329. A refurbished 2 MW, 50-Hz generator: $78,846. Mikado steam locomotive (#4501) in 1905 : $23,182.

Generator bearing change out: $6,000. Research report on wind and solar markets: $4,500. Lost production per day from turbine downtime: $2,120. Estimated value Michael Jackson’s estate by its estate: $2,105. 1-hp Grundfos 240V electric motor: $1,400.

Hatsan Nova 0.22 air rifle: $749. Apple iPhone 6: $549. Report on storage and smart grid: $299. Estimated kilowatt-hour cost for a pack of Tesla batteries by 2020: $217. Blade-bearing gasket for Gamesa G47 turbine: $176. Month of fitness classes in Ohio: $129. Shell Rhodina grease, box of 12, 400g tubes: $136. Monster testosterone booster: $79.99

One barrel WTI crude oil, 6/6: $47.22. Power/MWh levelized in 2015: $41.10. Shampoo, blow-dry, and style: $30. Wind power PPA per MWh, from interior U.S. in 2015: $26.43. Generator brushes: $17. A 2008 prediction for one gallon of gasoline in 2015: $9.15. Small wind turbine, per watt: $3 to $6. One-million BTUs of natural gas on 6/6: $3.02. Industrial electric prices in Germany, per kwh: $0.16. One dozen nonorganic eggs: $0.99.

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01 Editorial:
What if the nation went wild for wind power?

44 Projects:
Decommissioning Canada’s oldest wind farm

66 Cover
Foundations that float

What if the nation went wild for wind power?

By: Paul Dvorak

Suppose our nation decided that as coal and nuclear-powered facilities reached the end of their useful life, they would be replaced by wind-generated power. How many turbines would it take to generate that power and how much land would they occupy? Credit for the idea must go to Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind, who suggested the goal at the recent AWEA Offshore Wind conference.

To start, sources put U.S. power use at about 4.986 x 10⁹ megawatt-hours in 2013. Let’s round up to 5 x 10⁹ MWh. The EIA says those sources plus petroleum produced 54% of the nation’s power. That means our wind project must eventually replace:

P = 5 x 10⁹ MWh x 0.54
= 2.7 x 10⁹ MWh.

This experiment does not remove natural gas from the mix. Natural gas generators cycle quickly up and down, and would be needed to accommodate the variable nature of wind power.

Let’s think big and use turbines rated at 5 MW and a capacity factor of 35%. (The consulting firm Make Consulting recently commented that some capacity factors in North America are getting close to 50%.)

Therefore, for a full year, one 5-MW turbine would produce:
P_turbine-year = 5 MW x 365 days x 24 hr/day x 0.35

(the capacity factor)
= 15,330 MWh/year

To find the number of turbines needed:

N = (2.7 x 10⁹ MWh/year) / 15.33 x 10³ MWh/ year-turbine
= 176,125 turbines, the number needed to replace the retired coal and nuclear power plants.

To space the turbines, draw a tic-tac-toe grid, assume one mile on a side, and place a turbine in the center of each square. In this scheme, one square mile can fit nine turbines or 0.11 mi²/turbine.

For the total land area to accommodate 176,125 turbines, use:

A_total = 176,125 turbines x 0.11 mi²/turbine

= 19,374 mi²

An online list of state sizes (http://tinyurl.com/statesize) tells that West Virginia has about 24,078 mi², enough for one massive wind farm that would keep some of the state’s former coal miners off unemployment rolls. Or, to build a North American energy powerhouse, flat and windy North Dakota (68,976 mi²) has enough land for three such wind farms and the proximity to generate power for all of Canada as well.

Costs can be brought down by standardizing on one turbine size that several manufacturers can produce. The same would happen on the construction side if, for example, a 120-m tower was the standard.

What about costs? Recent reports are that a wind farm in Iowa constructed by an experienced team cost about $1.7 million/MW. Hence:

Cost total = 176,125 turbines x 5 MW/turbine x $1.7 million/MW

= $1,497,063 million ~ $1.5 trillion

Spreading the project over 30 years would call for a private investment of $49.9 billion per year. Of course, transmission is the fly in this ointment so portions of the project would have to be built at several sites in each state. Does that sound doable? It’s just a thought.

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01 Editorial:
More darn-near impossible grand challenges for the wind industry

06 Windwatch:
Research in Minnesota, MAKE Consulting looks ahead, Better blades ready for refits, Meet the wind tech

26 Retrofits
New ideas for upgrading communication networks

The next 10 darn-near impossible grand challenges for the wind industry

The idea of grand challenges came from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1980s. The challenges are stretch goals or difficult tasks that if accomplished would propel an entire industry forward. DARPA funds what appear as wacky ideas that could be useful to U.S. military forces. One recent Agency idea is a device to make things invisible, such as tank or soldier. Cool if possible. President Kennedy’s proposal to put a man on the moon was certainly a grand challenge that energized the space race. You get the idea.

This column has explored the idea of grand challenges for the wind industry once before in 2012. Three years later, the industry had hit three challenges. Four challenges were near hits, and three are still unmet. One challenge, active surfaces for more precise control, has been meet by Frontier Wind’s Gustbuster blade tabs. Sadly, Boulder Wind, the company that met another challenge by devising a lightweight, direct-drive generator has since closed its doors.

The time has come to revisit the grand-challenge idea and replenish the list. But this time, rather than rely on my own idle mind, I have enlisted the imagination of two talented people: Senior Editor Michelle Froese and CMS expert and contributor David Clark. He suggested defining challenges for OEMs and the O&M community. Good idea. So we pose this set of grand challenges for the OEM
community. We’ll get to the maintenance industry later.

So without further fanfare, here in ascending order are the 2016 Windpower Engineering & Development Wind Industry OEM Grand Challenges:

10. Make condition monitoring standard for every turbine. The only way to knock down maintenance costs is with predictive maintenance and CMS is key.

9. Self-erecting towers or turbines. We’ll take either.

8. The 10-MW land-based turbine. This development may depend on at least a 90m blade. The longest in the world, 88.4m, will go on an 8-MW turbine, but might work on a 10- MW design.

7. Lightning hit identifier. Which turbine blades have holes in them thanks to the last thunderstorm? Who knows?

6. A light weight, direct-drive generator that could eliminate the need for gearboxes.

5. Blades that will survive 20 years of operations.

4. Gearboxes capable of working 20 years without major repair. By one estimate, a gearbox costs up to $500,000 to replace. Trimming two replacements could make each turbine $1 million more profitable. Aerotorque’s torque limiter is a step in the right direction.

3. Smarter turbine controls, those that “know” what ails the turbine and tells an O&M crew so it need not waste time troubleshooting. Even better, controls that fix or detune the turbine to keep working till help arrives.

2. Less costly, high-capacity energy storage, capable of many megawatt-hours.

1. Less expensive and mass producible superconducting cable conductors. (Same as last time) Such cables would allow the transmission of power with little loss to load centers many miles from the wind farm. Wind assets would not sit idle as they sometimes do in the northwest because of a lack of local demand. ABB’s high-voltage dc is a step in the right direction.

If you know of a company that has genuinely met one of these challenges, they have been keeping secrets. Tell us about them. OK?

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