How Many Wind Turbines for Leaking Gulf Oil Well?
Found a great piece (well, with some help from some Facebook friends at Beckerman PR) on the real cost of offshore wind turbines versus offshore oil platforms in Forbes.
Karl Burkart’s piece asks, “How many offshore wind turbines could have been installed for the cost of one $10 billion Deepwater Horizon?,” the platform that sank and unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history:
How many turbines can $10 billion buy?
Assuming that the next few big offshore projects will drop in price as manufacturing and grid infrastructure improves, let’s say a 60-megawatt project will go for $200 million. Divide that into $12 billion and you get 60 60-megawatt wind projects, or about 33 billion kilowatts of power capacity per year.
How many electric cars does that power?
A typical American drives 12,000 miles per year. The latest plug-in electric vehicles (like the much-anticipated Tesla sedan) use about 370 watt-hours per mile. The U.S. driver’s 12,000 miles x .37 = 4,440 kilowatts per year. Divide 33 billion by 4,440 kilowatts and you get about 7.4 million electric vehicles that could be powered each year with a $10 billion wind investment.
Now while the piece does admit that the Deepwater Horizon well would have fueled more cars … 18.2 million vehicles per year … it does it at a higher cost per mile: 13.6 cents/mile for petroleum and only 3.7 cents/mile for electric vehicles running on wind-generated power.
If you figure that 7.4 million Americans would be saving $1,188 per year, that is about $8.8 billion going back into the U.S. economy rather than into the grubby hands of foreign oil companies like BP.
And that’s not even counting cleaning up the occasional mess created by Big Oil.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that wind energy is too expensive, just ask them: just how high of a price should we continue to pay for non-renewable oil?
9 Comments »
Cyril Fletcher
Theres another anomoly too. The power companies who own and run these wind turbines tell consumers its more expensive to produce green energy so it must be sold at a premium over conventional energy.
Governments should be legislating vigouresly to slap them down, the feedstock for the generation of wind power ie the wind is free, it should be cheeper.
Benefits of a Homemade Wind Turbine
[...] How Many Wind Turbines for Leaking Gulf Oil Well? – Domestic Fuel [...]
Dr Kon
BP’s Kent Wells Technical Briefing on May 31, 2010…
I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…
Dr Kon
Video: BP’s LMRP Cap Procedure Details (June 3, 2010)…
I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…
darrell
while I appreciate what you are trying to say, you made a major error in your calculations. You assumed that offshore rigs like the $10 billion New horizon are used to drill only one well and you assign the full $10 billion to the petroleum produced in one well……over their life, such rigs are expected to drill many many wells which totally changes the calculation
Steve Meyer
Mr. Davis calculation of electrical capacity for wind ignores the “utility factor” which is currently a small fraction of the capacity. For 1mW of land based wind power, you actually get about 22% utilization or 220kW. The move to offshore wind is all about getting the utilization up, but I don’t think anyone really knows what that number is going to be. Even if it is double, we’re not gaining any ground if the cost of the HWT is double to put it offshore.
Assuming a cost of $200mil for 60mW is an assumption that appears very skewed in favor of wind. Forecast cost for offshore wind is $5mil/mW as stated by Power Advocates in a briefing February 2010 in Austin. This means $10B translates to 2000 mW of capacity. This is a very different number than presented in the analysis.
It would be great to power electric cars, but at the current rate of 400,000 units per year of hybrids, mostly Japanese, it would take 45 years to purchase the 18.2 million cars proposed. Certainly if EV pricing comes down, the sales number will go up, but you get the idea.
We need better wind power solutions (see solidtechinc.com) to make this industry work without government subsidies. We need better electric cars (chevy Volt may be one of them) before consumers will adopt.
It’a all about the Absolute Value of Technology.
Richard Carlson
Steve, your comments are well taken.
However, in the grand scheme of things, wind is renewable and oil is not. Therefore as oil disappears, the price rises. And this is happening right now. So if the price of fuel oil were to quadruple, the calculations, once again, are another matter.
And if it becomes cheaper to run an eCar than an oil driven one (which eventually becomes impossible with no oil), guess what will happen to demand and production and sales of eCars?
If we don’t put our efforts and development dollars into alternative solutions we will all be walking and burning wood to heat our homes (until the trees disappear).
It’s not just all about the Absolute Value of Technology – there’s a little matter of availability of resources that comes into the equation as well…
Don Solomon
What about Geothermal? How may units culd be put in place for $10 billion? You need to drill (tech already developed) then clad the drill hole (Tech already developed) hole needs to be about 5 Km deep. You use geothermal energy to boil water (Hmm already invented) use the steam to generate (high pressure)elctricity, collect the steam and condence (for 2nd stage power capture using Stirling engines) Next, re-use condenced steam. This way you avoid miniralization (as seen in Iceland). This is a closed loop system with minimal loss. Currently Iceland produces 3.4 terawatts of power off geothermal (2007 figures WolframAlpha http://www.WolframAlpha.com).Currently there are The following are the five largest power stations in Iceland. The first two produce both electricity and hot water, whereas the other three produce only electricity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Iceland)
Don S.
Larry W.
A very good article showing the short-sightedness of assuming that oil will be our cheapest energy source for vehicles and how much it’s costing for “collateral damage.”
We seem to be unaware that energy is the true unit of wealth whether it’s in the form of work done by a machine or another person(think employment and slavery). The Western Economies are leveraged and dependent upon cheap energy that is extremely undervalued.
Try this thought experiment to get an idea of how undervalued: Imagine that you have been asked to push a car for a mile and been offered ten cents for the effort. Now imagine yourself pushing that car ( a compact) for 30 miles and given $3 for your effort. Not enough? What you feel your efforts should be worth is a realistic representation of the true value of energy.
If you can’t relate to what it’s like to push a car, go out tonight and push yours for at least a block and you’ll have a new understanding of the true value of energy. If you don’t want your grandchildren in Rickshaws then do what you can to get renewable energy into the mainstream.
Comments RSS feed — TrackBack URI
Leave a Comment