There was a very interesting article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend section) about wind farms in Victoria and some of the drawbacks involved. These include visual pollution (they stick the turbines on top of rural hills), noise (more than you'd think), shredding of birds, the involvement of cowboy energy entrepreneurs, and fractured rural communities divided by those for and against the turbines (that is, people pissed off with neighbours who have put them on their land). It may be that all of these things put together are not as bad as the fossil fuels that currently provide most of our electricity, but at the very least it seems we need to improve our thinking to ensure we're getting energy from wind in the best, least harmful way possible. Has anyone had personal experience of this? Mont
g'day mont, i've got no personal experience as such but i've seen pic's of those so called wind farms in victoria and also in the USA, they are the ugliest blot on the planet that anyone could wish. for me i'd rather see the trees that where there in the first place. i got no idea how where we are going to derive our power from but these and solar panel farms, just seem to be a blot on the landscape. might be better if each house provides it's own power on sight instead of trying to derive it from some central location? maybe even using the waves i don't know? some of the wave generators i've seen displayed seem less of an eyesore and not taking up valuable land space. len :?
Right on, De-centralize man! It is one of the permie fundamentals! Still, windmills are better than fossil fuels, agree, need to imrove on design a heck of a lot if theres so many problems too.
just to throw some thoughts/questions into the ring/hat. if i where to solar or wind power for around $30k with batteries, that would not power a 500+ cube/litre fridge let alone 200++ freezer or one of those 2meter cold roosm if i where to grow my own beef or table chickens/turkies/ducks or even pork. so for the money mentioned above for solar there are abtteries worth $6k they alst 10 years cost $600 a year to tuck away for replacements, and waht about the resources and pollution caused making them then disposing of them and the acid contained? solar panels last what about 20 years so could be a replacement cost of $1k per year to set aside and they are made of plastics made from fossile fules and always cause pollution even at first manufacture and at recycle time. to me noen of it realy fits permaculture as none of it is sutainable, and obviously wind farms aren't into maintaining, repairing, improving the habitat are they? and i haven't mentioned inverters etc., involved with renewable energy they all cost and they are all costly and made from plastics and their manufacture is suspect as far as pollutants etc.,. unless you are filthy rich $30 k is a lot of money it buys a lot of power, not to mention once again the depretiation factor and continual replacement cost of components. and with solar you need a back up generator to charge battieries (what is going to fuel this generator??????) on those wet times we seem to get even if we are in a drought, i know people who had it and got rid of it and i know someone with it who lives the life of an energy miser. we are here for a good time not a long time. and unless the WHOLE community does it then the odd person here or there doing it as a feel good notion is just not going to cut the rug is it? hey i would love to source an earth friendly properly sustainable low cost energy source to enable me to live sustainable, i reckon at 57 i'll never see it, and on a pension i'll never afford it. and as for wind farms i said it before theyr are an EYESORE. and will never offer sustainable affordable earth friendly energy. lens thoughts.
It's all solar... I've had this discussion with a number of people, and while I'm certainly not an authority in the area, here are some concepts that seem to make sense to me: Most energy is really solar energy. With the exception of gravitational and nuclear energy (and maybe others?), all of our energy is derived from the sun. Oil and coal are just old deposits of organic matter that soaked up the sun's rays. Wind is just solar energy transformed into kinetic energy, etc. As a society, there are strong forces pushing to centralize our energy. This seems to be because it's the best way to make a profit off of it. It definitely isn't the most effective. Consider: Spend enormous resources to gather some form of concentrated energy (drill oil, build wind/PV farm, etc), to transport it to a central place, and then use a fairly inefficient process to convert it to electricity. Then, transport the electricity over very expensive transmission lines (at a significant loss of power along the way) until it reaches our homes and work. Then, using another inefficient process, convert this electricity back into some form of heat for a variety of uses. Seems like a lot of waste in this process. One way around it is to use decentralized, passive solar to convert solar energy directly into heat where we need it. Heating a home this way is pretty easy, even in fairly extreme climates, as long as you can design or retrofit the home around passive-solar. This can be used for cooling, as well. There are several excellent books out there on passive solar cooling based on the vernacular architecture of the Middle East. There are passive-solar refrigerators, passive solar ovens, etc. And plenty of room for more innovation (corporate world won't help us here -- no profit in it). When we need to store solar energy, it seems like simple, local solutions like thermal mass and trees (firewood) are very effective. A well designed masonry/wood stove using firewood that you grow yourself can be a very clean, efficient option. Anyway, I'm sorry for going off on that tangent about passive solar, but it just seems to make so much more sense to me than large, high-tech, centralized solar farms or wind farms. The process of centralization itself makes some for some serious problems. And I'm not a total Luddite... modern electronics and communications are certainly nice. I guess my solution there would be to use DC-adapter style appliances... phone and laptop seem to be the most critical, and they can be charged by a very simple and inexpensive PV-cell system, around $100. Here's an article that I wrote on energy centralization, may be of interest: https://www.directactionjournal.org/energy.html Cheers- Jeff Vail https://www.jeffvail.net
I recently moved to an off the grid Permaculture project in the middle of the north pacific at a very windswept site and immediately wondered if the owners had considered a wind turbine to supplement the solar panels they have running. turns out they had, and that even with recent improvements in technology you can still get much more power for your dollar by going with extra panels and batteries than you can with turbines and towers, especially considering the regular maintenance required... I'm still wondering if this approach isn't putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak, and would love to hear more opinions on the subject, especially from people who have used wind power... A couple of neighbours here have wind generators of different sizes. One is on top of a really tall tower that must have been quite expensive and on a still night you can hear it whirring away even at a distance of about half a mile, but only if you go outside and stand on the verandah and actually try to hear it. It kind of disrupts the peace, but much less than if they were ACDC jamming circa 1977. The other nighbour has a really small system with two little props mounted on a tower no taller than say, 15 feet, and it is a lot quiter - I didn't know it was there until I actually walked down the guys driveway and at first I thought there was someone around the corner with an electric weedeater... I know that these decentralised wind applications aren't quite what Mont was referring to in the start of this thread though, so I'll hurl my two cents in regarding the mega wind farms too. I actually think that in the right place, those enormous propellors are a thing of great beauty. We drove past miles and miles of them earlier in the year somewhere in West Texas, in a place where hardly anyone lived and it was a bit like being in the film Koyanisquatsi, you know, but infinitely preferable to driving past, or heaven forbid living next to a coal fired or nuclear power station... I think that despite their obvious drawbacks and given current practices, wind farms are probably a good step between using dirty fuels and finding a new paradigm of localised renewable energy production...
Interesting article on this subject at: https://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D89.RE.Ch.4.Wind.html Certainly openned my eyes! Cheers M
Wind Energy There were two articles on the ABC last night of relevance to this thread: https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1249222.htm and https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/ ... 249211.htm Unfortunately there has been a significant amount of recent news regarding infrastructure issues (water, power etc) and the government's lack of attention to them over many years; sadly all too late for it to have been an issue in the recent election. The 7.30 report article discusses the lack of investment into maintaining electricity supplies and nominates that the main cause of the increasing demand is airconditioners - "it's a sign of a fairly affluent society, I guess". Designing sustainable buildings that do not rely on high energy inputs is a significant facet of permaculture. The Lateline article discusses Hubbards Peak, the apparently imminent peak in production of oil globally, following which we are eating into the remaining half of the reserves. Of course, the politically viable options all seem to be accelerated use of alternative fossil fuels, but this is the main driver of climate change. Mostly these issues are driven by money and economics, yet the real cost of continued reliance on fossil fuels is ignored. Now one aspect with renewable energy systems that I do not fully understand is the amount of embodied energy that goes into manufacturing them, when compared to the quantity of energy that they generate during their lifetime. However, production costs and maintenance costs for such systems would have to reduce IF investment into development and improvement occurred and even just increased quantity of production of existing systems would reduce the unit cost. All up my biggest concerns derive from the shortsighted approach that suggests technology will provide an alternative, and in the meantime, bugger the planet. I believe that any realistic opportunity to reduce power consumption and rely more on decentralised renewable power systems has to be a priority, and the concerns about economics and aesthetics are largely just a distraction. By the way, I used to live in Gippsland, downwind of the Latrobe Valley where much of Victoria's power is generated in coal fired power stations. The Latrobe Valley was recognised as having the highest incidence of child asthma in the country. Drive through the Valley, then decide whether a wind farm in the southern Strzlecki's really would be such an eyesore! My two pennies worth! Mark [/url]
g'day mark, quickly read your post so far will give it more time when i can later, but picked up on a couple of things you said, one was sustainable buildings and perma-c it just isn't in the mind set of society, permies or others yet maybe never will be untill it is too late, and as for sustainable housing forget it. the mind set in aus' is locked into the never worked european style housing. we see it here we have a perfectly comfortable home with no need for heating or cooling yet the bias of society dictates that we will have trouble selling, not that we really want to sell. the other matter is the renewable energy debacle, i'm having trouble like you are coming to terms with its earth friendliness?? i mean there is a whole lot of plastics used in the componentry, there are electronic units all with use by dates, or a better word built in obsolescence. there are in the case of solar, solar panels that maybe have a life expenctancy of 20 years, inverters with similar life span, batteries with use by date of 10 years (ongoing cost of $600 p/a) they generally cost around $6,000 initially. how does all this stuff get recycled?? another cost to the user i expect. and when you live on a tight budget none of this stuff ever pays for itself. not to mention the eye sore a wind farm is. better get off me soap box for now, but i think in perma-c we need to get past some of this feel good stuff and do some real things at times. len :?
