A wind turbine is only profitable if you can physically connect it to someone who needs energy while the wind is blowing. That will get harder as more are built.
The issue is the tumbling cost of regular wind turbines, even offshore. If you have such a field, you would build a turbine, not a kite.
So yes, you could make a profit. But there is an alternative source of technology that makes the same power and has become really profitable in the last 10 years.
I didn't say "profitable". I said "cheaper than a windmill". That's the standard in this industry. And windmills are really, really cheap. Pick the low hanging fruit, then get fancy. Exotic energy technologies are at best an exercise in premature optimization, and more likely an attempt at soaking the woke masses to fund someone's startup.
I can find plenty of sources saying that it isn’t profitable (there are too many to list here). I did look after reading his comment and found exactly 0 credible sources showing that it is currently profitable without subsidies today, and I looked again after reading your comment and still found nothing even when using the exact search you suggested. In fact the entire SERP for the one you suggested, with the exception of one article that suggests that offshore wind power might soon be profitable, has links to articles essentially saying that wind power is economically doomed.
Am I (along with the rest of the world, who would be dancing in the streets, dedicating trillions of dollars to deploying wind towers in every corner of the earth at this very moment, and writing thousands of credible articles about how the world’s energy problems have been solved if this were true) missing something?
Edit: the green folks are coming in and downvoting these comments like crazy. Could one of you please justify your downvote by replying with a link to a credible article that shows wind energy to be profitable without subsidies in non-exceptional places? I think everyone would love to see it, including myself! Google doesn’t seem to know about this very special, world-changing article. Perhaps it is protected with an overly aggressive robots.txt.
Stupid question but is there a market for lots of smaller wind turbines? What’s the efficiency like vs. one big turbine? Is there something like a solar farm with modular panels, but for wind?
At the macro scale, home windmills are a stupid idea. Anything can be done more economically at scale. Wind farms leverage economies of scale that don't work at home, so they can easily make more power per unit labor with the same hardware. If Jellyfish were efficient, they would be more efficiently used in wind farms.
At the micro scale, some people will buy them despite the economic inefficiency as a fell-good hobby project, but they'll never become widespread without being economical.
Also: small wind turbines make a fairly annoying constant noise. I'd vote to ban them from my neighborhood.
I look forward to the day when all the windmills have worn out, and the towers are standing around unused, mined out for rare-earth elements, but too expensive to take down. Then, we can stretch cheap mesh between them and generate power with no moving parts, by releasing ions to be carried away by the wind. Alvin Marks (holder of the patent on polarizing sunglasses) got a patent for that back in the '80s.
But the most important recent development in wind power has nothing much to do with windmills, as such. Roger Ruan at UMn, and Roger Gordon in Canada have both invented small-scale, efficient reactors that can turn power, water, and air into ammonia. This is important because the overwhelming majority of places with useful wind are nowhere near an electrical grid, but many of them have immediate uses for ammonia.
Now, you can put up a windmill anywhere, and it can produce useful liquid fuel and fertilizer any time the wind blows, with no inconvenience to anyone when wind doesn't blow. Farms need large amounts of both fuel and fertilizer, and have lots of space for windmills. Any extra ammonia can be sold to neighbors, so wouldn't need to be transported far. Ammonia is directly useful for fertilizer--you pipe it right into the ground behind plow blades, and soil microbes fix it instantly.
Any manufacturer of windmills should be very excited by this development, because it stands to radically increase the market for windmills. A single windmill is now a useful purchase, and any farm can use one. Industrial ammonia production consumes huge quantities of natural gas, and belches 10 megatons of CO2 every year, not counting exhaust from transporting it and processing it to solid form.
I'm concerned about all the math being per-area, which makes bigger windmills seem inevitable. But surely its per-dollar that determines commercialization potential. 1000 small windmills could be the better choice if they could be made cheaper per watt after all.
Most wind farms are located far from where the electricity generated is used. For example, Facebook is building a wind farm in Nebraska for facilities in California. The loss in transmitting power that far is ridiculous. Why aren't their wind farms built off the coast of northern California?
Wind turbines aren't carbon neutral. Better than coal, sure, but it's interesting that the discussion is always around building these things instead of reducing consumption. But no one gets rich off of reducing consumption.
I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.
It’s strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly cheaper and better, yet even with tons of government subsidies and political will behind it, it still can’t be built. Wouldn’t something truly more cost effective be easy to build because it’s cheaper? Clearly something doesn’t add up.
It's a question of what has the most bang for the buck. Using wind to generate electricity via big wind turbines has a vastly lower cost per ton of avoided carbon pumped into the atmosphere than using wind to move very small capacity sailboats across the ocean.
I really have no idea if this is possible, but is there any possibility that with enough wind turbines, we might discover a down side to them?
Each wind turbine essentially transfers power out of the wind and into our electric grid, right? Is it possible we could build enough turbines for that to be a problem?
I read something recently that stated, if you take all the energy that is required to build a wind turbine and set it up. The cost includes the mining of ores, the manufacturing process, the transportation, setup and the maintenance costs. It can spin until it disintegrates and will never be net positive energy.
I don't know if it's true, it could be full of shit, wish I could find it again.
I sooo want a wind turbine to supplement my solar, but as you say, I just can't make the economics work.
For starters, wind is a lot more mechanical. Meaning moving parts. Meaning maintainence, storm care, and so on.
For another it's more obtrusive, large, high, creates some degree of noise etc.
It's not exactly cheap. My inverter could handle it, but between the mounting and turbine, it's some real cash.
The argument for it just falls apart when I do the math. For less money and waaay less hassle, I could just extend the solar.
So I love the -idea- of wind but the economics of it just don't work at personal-scale (yet?)
Personal Hydro also looks interesting (but alas I have neither the elevation, nor river for that). For a while I researched ocean wave (especially shore wave), but I dont live by the sea.
Ultimately we use what we can get, which for me is solar. I get plenty of wind here, which is why it seems a waste to not use it, but again, economics...
I don't understand how wind could possibly be cheaper than natgas given that each of those big turbines is a $1M+ install and each time the turbine fails it's another million or so to fix it, multiplied by the dozens and dozens of turbines you need to generate a decent amount of electricity?
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