Wind Power: Turbine Time

While wind energy is increasingly becoming a growing source of power supply in the US power market, an overall market perspective is in order. Some pertinent facts include, according to DOE: a) By end of 2007, installed capacity of wind represented 1.2% of total electricity supply in the USA. b) Year 2007 saw one of the largest new wind capacity installation in the USA at 5,328MW with a...

The role of metals in the power sector is to provide materials of sufficent strength and in nuclear reactors, the material strength must be sustained at high temperatures.   The energy payback time is the time duration that the energy conversion device or machine must produce at its nominal capacity in order to replace the energy that was used to create the metals that formed the energy...

First lets understand most of the "blades" are manufactured from a hydrocarbon composit derived from oil, not metals. Some of the leading edges contain metal alloys. I believe Boone, who has been s a friend of mine for 30 years, never claimed to reduce dependence to Zero. We believe there is ample raw material to meet the challenge. Chester F. Barnes, II

Wind Turbines are certainly part of the alternate energy solutions for electricity, but the effective base load displacement with wind turbines is much less than the installed capacity.  Analysis of the Canadian Great Lakes Wind Turbines shows that the fluctuation in wind velocity and the seasonal wind speed significantly reduce the amount of base load on the electrical grid that can be replaces. ...

Wind turbines can be used to produce electricity but in order to do so they must use permanent magnets and batteries. Building even the 'modest' 17 gigawatts  of wind power generated electricity that Texas alone projects would add so much demand for rare earth metals as to be impossible to carry out  in the face of present growth in Chinese domestic demand for rare earth metals.