I don’t understand. Are US companies making wind turbines?
I don’t understand. Are US companies making wind turbines?
GE is already worlds No. 4 biggest wind turbine manufacturer, even though they are late and just start at the game. Most production capacity is right now in China, but that may only additionally fuel the ramp up of current America First efforts for re-industrialisation. ‘Wind energy’ is thought to revive the old times like automobile world domination. I wonder when Elon Musk will build wind energy factories?
He will need a few years to put together a working mod policy for Twatter, after which he needs to make windscreen wipers on Teslas to work reliably, so he’s got some way to go 
On wind turbines, I reckon there is a lot of cost which is not so much hidden (this isn’t some secret CIA programme for a new stealth aircraft) but is allocated to another budget. Allocating stuff to a “different” budget is the world’s second oldest profession.
If say you build a gas turbine, coal, or nuclear power station, you are generating at probably ~30kV and you can take that to ~400kV with one transformer and connect straight to the grid.
But with a wind turbine farm, you are generating AFAIK a few kV AC, variable voltage and variable frequency according to the RPM, this is fed via underwater cables to a central converter unit, this converts it to 50kV DC (this is what we have down the road here) which goes via very expensive underground cabling (involving a lot of land purchase of a ~20m wide strip of land) since you can’t build anything above it to another converter station which is usually located near a major substation. This stuff is not cheap… and has a far from the ~100% reliability of normal transformers. And I wonder who is paying for what…
I don’t understand the extreme amount of scepticism towards wind power on this forum. Perhaps it depends on one’s environment. I grew up in Northern Germany where the wind always blows and wind power has been used for centuries. You still find old windmills used for milling grain every few kilometers. The wind power plants of today are just a continuation of that tradition. On many days we in the North have an excess of electricity production due to our wind power, but the South of Germany which is generally wealthier has obstructed the building of wind power or at least the power lines needed to recieve our excess production for years and nowadays they often need to fire up gas power plants or import nuclear power from France to maintain their grid. Absurd.
Of course wind power by itself is not the solution to our energy needs but in many regions, especially coastal, it can play a significant part. The state of Schleswig-Holstein, wedged between the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and Denmark produces around 60% of its electricity through wind power.
MedEwok wrote:
I don’t understand the extreme amount of scepticism towards wind power on this forum. Perhaps it depends on one’s environment. I grew up in Northern Germany where the wind always blows and wind power has been used for centuries. You still find old windmills used for milling grain every few kilometers. The wind power plants of today are just a continuation of that tradition. On many days we in the North have an excess of electricity production due to our wind power, but the South of Germany which is generally wealthier has obstructed the building of wind power or at least the power lines needed to recieve our excess production for years and nowadays they often need to fire up gas power plants or import nuclear power from France to maintain their grid. Absurd.
Replace scepticism with experience and history of sustainable success of mechanical systems – they are almost never a lasting solution.
Yes, I grew up there too, but another part of the story is the traditional conservation of energy thinking of Northerners. It is much easier to establish a reduced energy consumption society when mentality is already preconditioned. Btw, when I was young the German South wasn’t the wealthy part, the West was. Those Sotherners were nurtured and fed by public money to wealth within a very few of the last decades. When I was a kid we went for holidays to Bavaria because it was so cheap, as a competition to Denmark, which was poor as well – hard to imagine from today to that situation.
MedEwok wrote:
The wind power plants of today are just a continuation of that tradition
It’s definitely not, but it is a sales trick that works on some people. Using wind to make flour makes sense because you can store both grain and flour, and the everyday schedule can (or could in it’s time) be arranged so the production was only done when the wind blows. Electricity cannot be stored. That is one problem. The other problem is related to the first, the electricity produced from a wind turbine is not on the right form or shape. The end product to the consumer is:
A wind turbine cannot deliver any of that. Additional power production is needed to “rectify” the electricity from wind turbine, because – there is no way to store electric energy in the amounts needed. South Korea was in it’s time engaged in using wind power to produce hydrogen. That make some sense because hydrogen can be stored. But cost and/or low overall efficiency will kill that also.
If electricity could be stored, wind turbines would make sense. This technology for the capacity needed does not exist, and it’s not envisioned to exist anywhere in the future.
For one household or a cottage or similar, it could make sense if the use of electricity is small, reducing battery capacity as much as possible.
MedEwok wrote:
I don’t understand the extreme amount of scepticism towards wind power on this forum
I think it’s an effect of people here being more in touch with the reality than most other people. I am not sceptic towards wind power though, I am 100% sure it is a dead end. A hot balloon waiting to burst. If people don’t understand why wind power is a dead end from a technological/economy point of view, so be it. What people do understand is what they have to pay for it. Eventually the true price will trickle down to each household. I don’t think we are there yet, but already today nuclear is cheaper, even these new compact ones are cheaper.
Are US companies making wind turbines?
They have to? they need a piece in the Biden 5T$ “2022 budget” where lot of it goes in “10 years US energy transition plans” with about 50Bn$ this year going into fixing whatever erratic kV voltage or RPM blips issues that are with wind turbines today
It’s a big stimulus (or subsidiary as Chinese or German view it), if you ever wonder where inflation comes from
Pity not much of that is going into nuclear fission & fusion which is the real and concrete “green” stuff but it does not sell well with voters (“that dog does not hunt”)
I still wonder when the first studies arrive against politics mainstream blowing, looking at the negative effects of wind turbines on local climate? At one of the last autumn storms over the Northsea one could nicely see the downwind of the wind turbine fields on weather radar, chopping storm cells, rain and wind into pieces – nobody can tell me that is without drastic influence on local climate development.
Do you have any screenshots of the radar pictures?
