Wind Energy – Sandy Butterfield on its Evolution & Future

Wind technology has evolved to be cheap, reliable, predictable, and grid-friendly. By 2015 the industry has grown into a 0 billion dollar industry worldwide and rising, employing 88,000 in the US alone.

Sandy Butterfield, President of Boulder Wind Consulting, shares an overview of the wind industry, its technological evolution and where he sees the industry going in the future.

Butterfield has been an innovator and leader in the field of wind energy his entire career. Prior to founding Boulder Wind Consulting, Sandy co-founded Boulder Wind Power, a venture funded startup focused on developing an innovative megawatt scale direct drive generator. Prior to that, he spent over 24 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), most recently as Chief Engineer at NREL’s National Wind Test Center and leader of the Gearbox Reliability Collaborative.

Recorded on Nov. 15, 2016 for the Boulder County Chapter of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society, BCRES. Info at cres-energy.org
Filmed and edited by Martin Voelker, JCRES.

Check the options for an automatic transcript.
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Is green energy, particularly wind and solar energy, the solution to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy needs and environmental obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains.
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Script:

Are wind and solar power the answer to our energy needs? There’s a lot of sun and a lot of wind. They’re free. They’re clean. No CO2 emissions. So, what’s the problem?

Why do solar and wind combined provide less than 2% of the world’s energy?

To answer these questions, we need to understand what makes energy, or anything else for that matter, cheap and plentiful.

For something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including every input that goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful.

Yes, the sun is free. Yes, wind is free. But the process of turning sunlight and wind into useable energy on a mass scale is far from free. In fact, compared to the other sources of energy — fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power, solar and wind power are very expensive.

The basic problem is that sunlight and wind as energy sources are both weak (the more technical term is dilute) and unreliable (the more technical term is intermittent). It takes a lot of resources to collect and concentrate them, and even more resources to make them available on-demand. These are called the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem.

The diluteness problem is that, unlike coal or oil, the sun and the wind don’t deliver concentrated energy — which means you need a lot of additional materials to produce a unit of energy.

For solar power, such materials can include highly purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and a dozen other complex compounds like titanium dioxide. All these materials have to be mined, refined and/or manufactured in order to make solar panels. Those industrial processes take a lot of energy.

For wind, needed materials include high-performance compounds for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, specialty magnets, as well as the steel and concrete necessary to build structures — thousands of them — as tall as skyscrapers.

And as big a problem as diluteness is, it’s nothing compared to the intermittency problem. This isn’t exactly a news flash, but the sun doesn’t shine all the time. And the wind doesn’t blow all the time. The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful would be if we could store them so that they would be available when we needed them. You can store oil in a tank. Where do you store solar or wind energy? No such mass-storage system exists. Which is why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them require backup. And guess what the go-to back-up is: fossil fuel.

Here’s what solar and wind electricity look like in Germany, which is the world’s leader in “renewables”. The word erratic leaps to mind. Wind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing completely. And solar produces little in the winter months when Germany most needs energy.

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/can-we-rely-wind-and-solar-energy

23 thoughts on “Wind Energy – Sandy Butterfield on its Evolution & Future”

  1. Prager U, presenting 'facts' is one of your strong points however NOT with this video. Which oil company subsidized this video? The science in this video is flawed. Energy from sun and wind are NOT dilute and/or intermittent. Energy from these 'green' sources can be stored, how? It's called a battery. Secondly, extracting coal and/or oil then processing said materials also takes an enormous amount of resources, materials and energy to convert to energy. The 'net' energy output is therefore low. Thirdly, no one can dispute the irreparable environmental damage caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The 'higher energy' bills as mentioned in Germany does not account for the subsidies Germans receive for producing surplus energy. Being 'off-grid' and NOT being dependent on finite, environmentally unfriendly resources is the future. Ending the dependency on oil from the Islamic fundamentalist tyrants in the Middle East is the way to go. I support Prager U because of the 'facts' on issues communicated on an easy to understand way. This video however is quite deceiving and disappointing with regard to the obvious influence of some oil lobbyist.

    Reply
  2. As someone who is heavily involved in the environmental sector and renewable energy‘s I have to disagree with many of the statistics shown in this video.

    Prager you guys normally do an amazing job with your videos however this is definitely one I am disappointed with.

    Reply
  3. There's this cool solar power plant in china where they essentially harness excess power with the types of batteries smartphones use. Also, Fukushima is a good reason not to want more nuclear plants. It's still killing the Pacific years later…

    Reply
  4. only to take work load off the plants. fossil fuels cant be too bad, just reduce the amount we produce. heard that they have fossil fuels stored to increase 2 degree C 5X over. way too much ff dug up! seems to be more reliable. also heard natural gases are becoming more available. could be wrong. just my opinion assuming c02 is even the case.

    Reply
  5. Tesla power-wall? Anyone? Why did he say it exists no way to store wind and solar? Didn't it exist at the time of this video?

    Reply
  6. Solar + Battery = Electricity for the future
    Passive solar + better insulation + geothermal = Heat for the future

    Solar and batteries will be cheap cheap cheap and this video will be more ridiculous every year.

    Reply
  7. I couldn't disagree more. there actually places in the world that gotten negative electricity prices due to the wind and solar

    Reply
  8. That's why we need think out of the box. Use sustainable energy has it's own problem, to sort out those problems we need to answer the question unique way. Solar and wind combined with conventional energy producing mechanism and new type of energy storage system such as hydropower plants should be used along with most distributed solar energy generation. It will not straightforward as using oil, gas or nuclear, but with complex mechanism it will be more cheap reliable and worth to afford.

    Reply
  9. Rooftop solar has already achieved grid parity in many markets around the U.S. I pay ZERO power bills. My energy use is 100% offset by solar. Plus, if you hurry, you can still scam the idiot taxpayers out of 1/3 of the cost.

    But it can never eliminate the need for a power grid. There is no solar at night. Very little when it's cloudy. Solar is impractical in many areas due to weather or terrain. And the amount of solar energy hitting the Earth per square foot is surprisingly puny compared to what we use. Even if solar panels could be 100% efficient (which cannot happen) they still couldn't replace the grid.

    Storing excess solar energy, when it's available, is prohibitively expensive and always will be. "Home batteries" cost more than your HOUSE, if you want to go off grid. They are impractical. And there will be no miraculous breakthroughs in battery technology. Merely incremental improvements in efficiency and cost. Furthermore, the more exotic and high-tech the batteries become the more dependent they are on rare materials that must be sourced from unfriendly parts of the world that have nuclear-tipped ICBMs pointed at us. Think being dependent on the Arabs is problematic? They don't have nukes.

    NUCLEAR isn't just one alternative. It's the only possible solution it the long term, supplemented by rooftop solar.

    Consider what cheap, plentiful, clean nuclear energy could do. There will never be a better solution for personal transportation than to carry your vehicle's energy source in chemical form. You can make synthetic motor fuels, with a net zero carbon footprint, if you have nothing but ELECTRICITY and methane. And such fuels work better than crude oil-based fuels. They're both cleaner and more energy-dense. Nuclear energy can potentially breath new life into the good old-fashioned internal combustion engines that have revolutionized our lives.

    Reply
  10. lol… The German government dumped billions of taxpayer dollars into making energy UN-affordable for everyone! Launching a "energy poverty" epidemic.

    That Sounds familiar – like everything government touches in the US. Affordable Healthcare, Affordable Housing, Affordable Schooling all ranking the highest costs of all to REAL people. Socialism makes me sick.

    Reply
  11. it doesn't get dumber than where I live. The only city in western Canada with its own hydro plant puts solar panels at the dam. While cleaner greener water and its profits spill over. My city has a reputation for the most pot, homeless, unaffordability, etc., I think it was too much pot for the mayor and council that let this happen. We also have gravity water systems where one can make power in the Pressure reducing stations, but no we get solar panels, where the sun doesn't shine, but green votes for the mayor.

    Reply
  12. Biggest crock of shit. The rest of the world is moving forward with it…us will be left holding its useless bag of coal. Trump or no Trump green energy is happening. Pager u is right wing horse shit.

    Reply
  13. How's this: build a single self-replicating robot that can use sand and solar energy to make MORE robots, as well as superconductors; and then put it in the middle of the Sahara desert to completely convert it to a gigantic solar field and power-grid to power the entire Eastern hemisphere.
    Then do the same with the Saudi desert, and any other country with a large desert region.
    That would produce more power than we could possibly use, and cost virtually nothing.

    Reply
  14. "Fossil fuel in Germany has increased" – you make it sound as if it's because of the renewables. It is not. Germany started using more coal because of the Fukushima nuclear accident, they decided to immediately close the oldest nuclear plants and entirely phase-out nuclear power by 2022, therefor the heavy reliance on coal. Elon Musk will be supplying the batteries and the price of solar keeps going down. Solar and wind are already far cheaper than fossil fuels if you take into account the subsidies for fossil fuel, the price of pollution and the price of people's health.

    Reply

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