Wikipedia

User:Teratornis/Energy

< User:Teratornis

This user subpage contains notes to organize my edits to articles relating to energy.

Welcome edit

I invite comments from other Wikipedians. Please comment on the talk page. I have it on my watchlist. If you find it easier to comment on this page, be my guest, but I will usually move such comments onto the talk page after I take them into account on this page.

This page illustrates how I search for references using templates such as {{Google}} and {{Google scholar cite}}. These templates allow me to record my actual searches, so other users can verify the results, and (possibly) learn to use the same tools. Everything we learn about Wikipedia comes from studying the work of other Wikipedia users. I am grateful to all the Wikipedia users from whose work I have learned. On this page I document some of my work in more detail than I can put into edit summaries and talk page comments. If you find anything useful here, consider paying it forward by documenting some of your own work for others to study. Maybe you will teach me something new.

I have lots of to-do items on this page that I may not get to soon. If you find anything you'd like to do now, feel free to do it. You can tell me what you did, or just let me find out that you did, when I get around to checking whether I still need to do that task. Also, feel free to steal any ideas you can apply in ways I did not think of.

I date most of my entries, but I don't always get around to updating my notes after I complete a task. Not many people besides me look at this page.

Peak oil edit

I created a {{Peak oil}} navigation template, and I added it to all the articles it links to, and a few more.

Out of Gas edit

06:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC): to-do: write an article about David Goodstein's book: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil. I checked out a copy of the book from the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. See: WP:BK and Wikipedia:WikiProject Books.

23:02, 4 May 2008 (UTC): several other users created the article. I would like to add a detailed chapter by chapter synopsis, with links to all the topics Goodstein mentions which have Wikipedia articles. That would be a lot of links. Are we allowed to do that? See some other nonfiction book articles that have synopses:

I'll make my synopsis in User:Teratornis/Sandbox3.

Google Books has some useful information about this book:

National Geographic edit

National Geographic Magazine has run several articles that mention peak oil. I vaguely recall at least one article in National Geographic from the 1970s or 1980s, which I believe had a large illustration of Hubbert's curve. I think that may have been the first time I ever saw Hubbert's curve. I should try to find that article.

The June 2008 issue of National Geographic has another article about peak oil. I mentioned it in a Help desk answer:

Here is the citation: 

<ref name="ngm_world_oil">
{{cite web
|url=http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/06/world-oil/roberts-text
|title=Tapped Out
|publisher=[[National Geographic Magazine]]
|accessdate=2008-05-17
|last=Roberts
|first=Paul 
|year=2008
|month=June
}}
</ref>
  • Roberts, Paul (June 2008). "Tapped Out". National Geographic Magazine. Retrieved 2008-05-17.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Peak oil user pages edit

05:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC): I've run across several user subpages about peak oil. Search for them systematically, using one of my searches from {{Help desk searches}}:

User:Americanus/Peak Oil People edit

17:45, 28 April 2008 (UTC): I ran across the page: User:Americanus/Peak Oil People when I searched Wikipedia with Google for: The end of oil. I left some suggestions for the author at: User talk:Americanus#Peak oil people (permanent link). It might be nice to promote that page to a list in article space. However, it looks like that user has not recently been active, so he or she might not see my suggestions soon.

Costs of energy in different forms edit

05:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC): the oil price increases since 2003 have mixed up the costs of energy from different sources. Since oil has increased in price more than six times from its 2003 low, and almost ten times since its late 1990s low, petroleum and refined petroleum products are now getting to be fairly expensive sources of energy. Make a table showing the cost and energy equivalence for several forms of energy. This is relevant for determining when various alternatives become economical for various applications. For example, right now the cost of energy in the form of retail motor gasoline is considerably higher than the cost of energy in the form of retail electricity, at least where I live (where electricity comes mostly from coal-fired plants - yuck).

The following table compares several sources of energy, stating a typical cost for each one. (Since most sources of energy vary widely in price, I will extend the table to list several rows for each source, to show the effect of price variations.) For each source of energy, each row shows a sample cost for the unit which people use to measure that source, the energy density for that unit, the equivalent cost if we could convert that source to motor gasoline at 100% efficiency, and the equivalent cost if we could convert that source to electricity at 100% efficiency. (Of course because of Carnot efficiency we can only convert about 30% of the heat of combustion of a fuel into electricity in a thermal power plant. But note, using electricity to charge batteries in an electric vehicle leads to a much lower vehicle fuel cost than the hypothetical conversion of electricity into gasoline, because a gasoline engine is only between 15% and 30% efficient, whereas the combination of batteries and electric motors can be between 80% and 90% efficient, I believe. Thus the fuel cost for an electric vehicle would be only about a third of the equivalent cost to generate a gallon of gasoline from electricity. In effect, the comparison is between the energy content of the coal that feeds the power plant vs. the refined gasoline that feeds the internal combustion engine in an automobile. This compares well with the figures in Electric car#Ownership costs, which also show a much lower fuel cost per mile for electric cars compared to internal combustion engine vehicles.)

Energy source Cost Energy density $/MJ $/gallon (gasoline equivalent) $/kWh (electricity equivalent)
Coal $130/ton MJ/ton $/MJ $/gallon $/kWh
Natural gas $/ MJ/ $/MJ $/gallon $/kWh
Petroleum $128/bbl 6.1 GJ/bbl $0.0209836066/MJ $2.74885246/gallon $0.0755409836/kWh
Gasoline $4/gallon 131 MJ/gallon $0.0305343511/MJ $4/gallon $0.109923664/kWh
Electricity $0.05/kWh 3.6 MJ/kWh $0.0138888889/MJ $1.81944444/gallon $0.05/kWh

Conversion factors:

Conversions using Google Calculator (one must use {{=}} to represent the equal sign in the {{Google}} template):

  • Coal:
  • Natural gas:

Some comparisons that would be useful to make:

References:

Vincent Ellis McKelvey edit

It might be interesting to write a biography of Vincent Ellis McKelvey (already red linked from: Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/American politicians/Executive branch#Past Directors of the U.S. Geological Survey). Apparently he led the opposition to M. King Hubbert, and lost his job by betting against Peak oil. His saga may be an object lesson for the peak oil deniers of today, who still seem to dominate the Energy Information Administration. See this excerpt:

The US Secretary of the Interior at the time, Stewart Udall, later apologised for having helped lull Americans into a "dangerous overconfidence" by accepting the advice of the US Geological Survey so unquestioningly. A long-serving US Geological Survey director who had led the campaign against Hubbert, V E McKelvey, was forced to resign in 1977.

22:22, 25 June 2009 (UTC): someone else started the Vincent Ellis McKelvey article, but it currently reads somewhat like a puff piece, without explaining why McKelvey resigned. See if I can find reliable sources for more details about McKelvey's campaign against M. King Hubbert, and then work them in.

Anoxic event edit

19:54, 21 June 2008 (UTC): the Anoxic event article doesn't mention the possibility of humans triggering the next one, by burning a sufficient quantify of fossil fuel in a sufficiently short time. In keeping with Wikipedia:Build the web, look for ways to link to and from the Anoxic event article and articles pertaining to Peak oil and Global warming.

Price of crude oil and price of gasoline edit

Most people notice the price of motor fuel more than the price of crude oil, since few people consume crude oil directly. That's part of why the Oil price increases since 2003 did not become very noticeable until recently, when the price of motor gasoline began rising faster. This reference explains the relationship:

Jason Grumet edit

19:29, 29 June 2008 (UTC): Jason Grumet is Barack Hussein Obama's senior energy advisor, and director of the National Commission on Energy Policy (which needs an article, by the way). If Obama wins the upcoming election, Grumet may become one of the most powerful figures in energy. Therefore he would certainly be notable enough for a Wikipedia article, and he probably is notable enough already. Learn more about Jason Grumet:

For example:

08:54, 17 October 2008 (UTC): Jason has been active recently:

T. Boone Pickens, Jr. edit

References edit

18:23, 17 June 2008 (UTC): search for some references with the {{Google scholar cite}} template that I recently created:

Peak oil discussion at Richard Dawkins Forum edit

There is an interesting discussion thread about peak oil on the Richard Dawkins Forum. I've posted to it a fair amount. Some postings in the thread contain links to reliable sources for energy-related articles on Wikipedia.

Food security edit

08:16, 17 October 2008 (UTC): the peak oil literature raises many alarms about the degree to which industrial agriculture and intensive farming depend on the exhaustible resources of petroleum and natural gas. The basic facts are that world population has boomed as a result of man's increasing drawdown of fossil fuel to boost agricultural productivity, fueling the green revolution, and to ship food around the world. The result is that the present world population is much larger than could survive on the style of agriculture and local self-sufficiency that was common before the petroleum age. Thus a consequence of post-peak oil declines in petroleum extraction could be starvation on an unprecedented scale. The world's poorest billion people live on about $1/day or less, and the next poorest two billion on $3/day or less. Rising costs for petroleum and natural gas have contributed strongly to the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, since the cost of food represents, to a large degree, the cost of the fossil fuel to produce the food. To make matters worse, world population continues to grow at about 77 million new people per year, with most of the growth among the poorest people. Poor people consume the least amount of fossil fuel per capita, but a large proportion of what they do consume is in the form of fossil fuel inputs to the food they eat. Since the poorest people may spend most of their income on a subsistence diet, they are highly vulnerable to being priced out of adequate food as prices for fossil fuels rise.

Even wealthy nations are not immune to food risk, should the supply of fossil fuel decrease faster than societies can adapt. Cuba's Special Period may be a model for what the rest of the developed world may experience in a future of increasingly scarce petroleum.

Unfortunately for clarity, it's easier for people to call attention to a problem than to analyze it competently. Modern food production does depend heavily on the fossil fuels first in line to become scarce. However, this only spells doom if nothing else can substitute for these fossil fuels inputs quickly enough. Thus we need to know what substitutes are available, how much they cost, and how fast people can scale them up.

Renewable ammonia edit

One very large fossil fuel input to agriculture is in the form of natural gas to produce hydrogen via steam reforming, which then feeds the Haber process to create ammonia for fertilizer. I.e., natural gas provides the energy for nitrogen fixation. The straightforward way to make this process sustainable is to use renewable energy to generate electricity to generate hydrogen from electrolysis of water. (In a hypothetical hydrogen economy, this would equate to diverting some of the hydrogen from use as an energy carrier to a feedstock, much as some of natural gas and petroleum go to feedstock use today.) Thus the exhaustion of natural gas need not spell doom as long as enough electricity is available from other sources. However, the cost of ammonia will probably be higher. Some quick notes and links to organize later:

  • Ammonia production#Sustainable ammonia production - a brief section I added on March 23, 2008. My notes were somewhat preliminary because at the time I was only aware of Iceland's small production of renewable ammonia.
  • Bradley, David (2004-02-06). "A Great Potential: The Great Lakes as a Regional Renewable Energy Source" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-10-04. - Bradley has a section that discusses the economics of generating ammonia from wind power, with calculations to show the cost equivalence between natural gas and electricity (that is, the prices for the two commodities that make them equivalent on cost for generating ammonia).
  • Norsk Hydro - the company made renewable ammonia for years, until abundant supplies of cheap natural gas provided a (temporarily) cheaper source for hydrogen.
    • Vemork - a dam and hydroelectric power station built by Norsk Hydro which produced hydrogen by electrolysis from 1911 to 1971. Ironically, it ceased hydrogen production at almost the same time that U.S. oil production was peaking, which humbled the many critics of M. King Hubbert, who had predicted the timing of the peak correctly back in 1956 to widespread ridicule. This was also just before the 1973 oil crisis raised awareness of fossil-fuel dependency and the need to develop renewable energy.
  • Pickens Plan - T. Boone Pickens wants to expand the use of compressed natural gas to power transportation in the U.S., as a way to cut U.S. oil imports more quickly than plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles seem likely to. Since natural gas costs about half as much as the energy equivalent in gasoline or diesel fuel, it seems almost inevitable that the free market will begin diverting natural gas to transportation, putting pressure on natural gas prices. Thus an indirect way to free up more natural gas for transportation would be to take it out of ammonia production. In other words, you can either power transportation directly with electricity, or power it indirectly with electricity by using electricity to free up natural gas. The choice will obviously depend on how fast battery technology progresses.

It would be interesting to expand the sustainable ammonia production section I started with more of the history of Norsk Hydro's ammonia production, and coverage of Bradley's cost analysis.

George Monbiot interviews Fatih Birol edit

09:33, 18 December 2008 (UTC): George Monbiot interviews Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency in this video from the Guardian UK:

The video is interesting. Monbiot mildly grills Birol over the large (negative) change in the IEA's projections of future oil supplies. Birol dodges the worst pretty deftly, without really addressing Monbiot's point, namely that governments around the world had been basing their plans on IEA projections, and now the IEA is saying there won't be as much oil in the future as it was predicting as recently as one year earlier.

Michael Klare edit

07:10, 18 March 2009 (UTC): the Michael Klare article does not do this author justice. I watched Blood and Oil on YouTube, a documentary featuring Michael Klare, which details the history of U.S. military dealings with Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, dating back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Related articles:

To-do: get this book and write an article about it:

  • Klare, Michael (2004). Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Metropolitan Books. ISBN 9780805079388.
  • Google Books link - shows a partial preview of the book's contents.
  • Energy Victory - a book with overlapping content, but from a somewhat more neoconservative perspective.
  • See my related notes in the section: #Out of Gas above.

Review Wikipedia:WikiProject Books about how to write book articles. Study examples of featured articles about books and films:

Start a subpage at:

and then move it to the article space after I develop it.

08:06, 18 April 2009 (UTC): I'm poking away at it, a little at a time. It's interesting that Wikipedia has articles about seemingly every person, place, or thing mentioned in the book, and most of what Wikipedia has about these topics appears to agree with Klare's synthesis. A book article on Wikipedia can add a lot of value to a book, simply by linking to many things the book mentions.

16:42, 24 April 2009 (UTC): Klare cites the National Defense Council Foundation which has some figures on the true cost of U.S. oil imports.

20:48, 24 April 2009 (UTC): When citing a book multiple times, here are some tips I saw on the Help desk:

  • Wikipedia:Footnotes#Style recommendations
  • Wikipedia:Citing sources#Shortened footnotes
  • {{Rp}} - a template (the name of which stands for "reference pages") for appending Harvard referencing-style page numbers to Cite.php-generated inline reference citations. It is presently the only solution for the problem of an article with a source that you want to cite many, many times, at numerous different pages, from within a single article.
    • To-do: look for some featured articles that use this template.
      • A counterexample is the God Is Not Great article, which uses multiple, manually-formatted, ad hoc page number references.

16:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC): consider making a Timeline of U.S. military involvement the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. See Lists of timelines for examples.

Transportation dependency on oil edit

19:01, 24 March 2009 (UTC): several articles that discuss "energy" do not clearly describe the special (and as of 2009, currently irreplaceable at scale) role of petroleum in powering transportation. While petroleum accounts for "only" 40% of U.S. energy consumption, it supplies the fuel for approximately 97% of transportation in the U.S. Transportation is critical to nearly every sector of a modern economy, which depends on the ability to move goods and people in large volumes quickly. It is misleading to lump petroleum in with "energy," because while that makes sense from a simple First law of thermodynamics equivalence between work and heat, it overlooks the practical engineering differences between an energy carrier which is conveniently portable, and other sources of energy which people have to consume in fixed locations. For example, electricity moves conveniently through wires, but available methods for storing electrical energy have very low energy densities compared to liquid fuels from petroleum. This restricts most electricity consumption to locations near electrical outlets, or to electric trains or buses that can run from overhead lines on fixed routes.

Determine the best way to add this type of clarification to the sections which at the moment do not explain it well, if at all:

Find the articles, if any, which explain this dependency. I'm pretty sure I have seen some.

I've heard Matthew Simmons say "Oil is transportation" in some of his videos. Find a reliable source for this quote.

Here's a source that predicts the U.S. will take eight years to get to one million battery-electric vehicles, and 35 years for the world to "fully embrace" electric vehicles:

Luckily for the industry, the switch to electric cars is expected to be gradual. Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute, a research outfit for the electric utility industry, says having 1 million on U.S. roads in eight years is an achievable goal. Just last week, Volkswagen CEO Stefan Jacoby estimated in a speech at UCLA that it could take 35 years for the world to fully embrace electric vehicles.

The slow transition to electric vehicles might be "lucky" for the industry, but it sounds catastrophic for U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The U.S. is on pace to have virtually no domestic oil left in 35 years. In the meantime, U.S. population is growing faster than in most if not all the other developed countries.

See my additional notes in #Transportation below.

Petroleum in the United States edit

07:54, 21 December 2010 (UTC): Until last year there was no Petroleum in the United States article, which was odd considering that the US is the world's largest oil consumer and importer, and (as of 2010) still the third largest producer. The article has some empty or sparse sections someone could expand. I added a {{Commonscat}} to link from the article to Commons:Category:Petroleum in the United States for some related media already on Commons.

The article says nothing about greenhouse gas emissions at the moment. See Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States and the USEPA Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

Natural gas in the United States edit

07:54, 21 December 2010 (UTC): there is no Natural gas in the United States article. But we do have:

Wind power edit

Several of the smaller articles about Wind power need work, or need starting.

Wind power in the United States edit

Wind power in the United States#Wind power in the states shows a table listing the wind potential for the 50 states, with Ohio at 4,000 GWh/yr. This seems to be far lower than the updated NREL estimate for Ohio which accounts for 100m turbine hub heights, which I referenced in the #Ohio wind power potential section above:

66,000 MW * 0.3 (capacity factor) * 24 (hr/day) * 365 (day/yr) = 173,448,000 MWh/yr = 173,448 GWh/yr

In fact the value in the table is 173448/4000 = about 43 times lower. This is a massive discrepancy. I should investigate it.

United States wind resource map edit

03:34, 4 October 2008 (UTC): find an updated wind resource map for the U.S. Image:US wind power map.png is rather old, does not show the newest data, and reflects a lower hub height (50m) than is becoming standard for newer commercial wind turbines (100m). See my comments in:

AWS Truewind has an interactive wind resource map for the U.S., but AWS Truewind sells wind resource maps so I doubt that their maps are available for free distribution on Wikipedia. Search the Web for wind resource maps from the U.S. government (which would then be free under {{PD-USGov}}).

Those searches find some links, several of which I have seen before:

Between fragmented authoritarianism and policy coordination: Creating a Chinese market for wind energy

09:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC): an updated wind map is here; I uploaded it to Commons:

09:13, 25 February 2010 (UTC): now NREL has new wind resource maps, for the whole US at 80m and apparently for every state now. See:

Unfortunately, the maps are available in PDF which I might be able to convert to SVG. There are also some very large PNG files that look like blowups from the PDFs. The PDF file of the US has vector information, as the state boundary lines draw after the wind resource region raster scrolls onto the screen like a curtain. Here are instructions to convert PDF to SVG, except that I don't have all the programs:

It would probably be a nightmare to figure out how to import all this new data and maps to Commons.

04:29, 28 February 2010 (UTC): User:Xenon54 on the Help desk recommends Media-Convert for online conversion. I will try that. You just specify a URL, and the input and output formats. Except that when you specify a URL, you don't get as many choices for the output format. So I will convert from the local file I downloaded, us_windmap_80meters.pdf. But that does not work either, because when you select PDF as the input, you only get a few output formats, and the two that I want are not there (SVG and PNG).

20:06, 28 February 2010 (UTC): it would be nice if the wind resource data was available as a shapefile, like the other shapefiles from the National Atlas:

Then we could generate our own maps of the various states, using a program such as Quantum GIS.

16:48, 23 October 2010 (UTC): see: Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Resources/PDF conversion to SVG.

Onshore wind resources by state edit

On February 11, 2010, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released the first comprehensive update of the wind energy potential by state since 1993.

Since the XLS file of wind potential is inconvenient, transcribe the figures for various states, starting with the states that appear (or will soon appear) in the {{Wind power in the United States}} template: 

              Wind Energy Potential	
              Installed       Annual 
              Capacity (MW)   Generation (GWh)
Arizona        10,904.1        30,616
California     34,110.2       105,646
Illinois      249,882.1       763,529
Indiana       148,227.5       443,912
Iowa          570,714.2     2,026,340
Kansas        952,370.9     3,646,590
Maine          11,251.2        33,779
Michigan       59,042.3       169,221
Minnesota     489,270.6     1,679,480
Missouri      274,355.1       810,619
Montana       944,004.4     3,228,620
Nebraska      917,998.7     3,540,370
New Hampshire   2,135.4         6,706
New Mexico    492,083.3     1,644,970
New York       25,781.3        74,695
North Dakota  770,195.8     2,983,750
Ohio           54,919.7       151,881
Oklahoma      516,822.1     1,788,910
Oregon         27,100.3        80,855
Pennsylvania    3,307.2         9,673
South Dakota  882,412.4	    3,411,690
Texas       1,901,529.7     6,527,850
Washington     18,478.5        55,550
Wyoming       552,072.6     1,944,340

Statistics edit

20:20, 6 May 2010 (UTC): a report from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy with some statistics for wind power and other renewables for the United States:

The whole report has many interesting tables, maps, and graphs about renewable energy. Page 58 has a graph and table showing US wind power growth and annual generation. Some of that information is not yet in Wind power in the United States. 

                U.S. Wind Energy Capacity
      U.S. Wind Energy      and Percent Increase
        Generation          from Previous Year
       (Million kWh)       Total (MW)   % Increase
2000     5,593                2,578       2.6%
2001     6,737                4,275      65.8%
2002    10,354                4,686       9.6%
2003    11,187                6,353      35.6%  
2004    14,144                6,725       5.9%
2005    17,811                9,121      35.6%
2006    26,589               11,575      26.9%
2007    34,450               16,824      45.3%
2008    52,026               25,369      50.8%
2009
2010

The Renewable Energy Data Book says total US primary energy consumption in 2009 was 94.9 Quadrillion Btu. (94.9 quadrillion British thermal units (27,800 TWh))

Wind power in the USA edit

The Wind power in the United States article has this wind resource map: Image:US wind power map.png which dates from around 1985, according to its documentation page. Newer wind power maps for the U.S. are better, since the U.S. government and the wind industry have prospected more for wind as the industry has developed. See for example:

06:38, 24 August 2008 (UTC): the above link seems to be broken now.

00:02, 7 December 2008 (UTC): at 8 minutes into this video, a sequence of USA maps from NREL shows the growth of installed wind power by state and year:

It would be interesting to find the source images, upload them to Commons, and add them to a gallery tag in Wind power in the United States. It would also be interesting to combine all the images into an animated graphic file, but I don't know what format we can use on Commons. Wikipedia has at least this animated graphic in GIF:

which appears in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Nav. Actually that page shows a still image with a link to the animated GIF, with this wikitext: 

[[Image:Glass tesseract still.png|200px|]]

'''The [[tesseract]], the four-dimensional analog of the cube.<br/>To see an animated version, click [[:Image:Glass tesseract animation.gif|here]].'''

I am looking for the maps; I have not found them yet. But here are some:

I found the animated graphic; it's right on the NREL's Wind Powering America home page:

Actually the site says it's part of EERE, but the images say NREL on them. I guess all these DOE offices and laboratories overlap. More maps are here:

Here's the latest installed capacity map for the U.S.:

Figure out how to upload this to Commons. Look at an example first:

The above image has this wikitext: 

== Summary ==
{{Information
|Description=Direct_normal_solar_radiation_2004
|Source=http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/us_csp_annual_may2004.jpg
|Date=2004
|Author=usa 
|Permission=pd
|other_versions=
}}

== Licensing ==
{{PD-USGov}}
{{Uncategorized|year=2008|month=October|day=23}}

I'll make a suitable category for this image and the other images from NREL that are on Commons. See if commons:Category:NREL is available.

I see this interesting category:

which appears to automatically contain every image that has the commons:.

The NREL disclaimer doesn't say whether I can use its images. However, the site links to this page:

Copyright

Materials on the EERE Web site are in the public domain. EERE requests that it be acknowledged as the source in any subsequent use of its information. Some materials on this site have been contributed by private individuals, companies, or organizations and include a copyright notice. It is the user's responsibility to contact copyright owners and obtain the written permission required under U.S. copyright law before using these materials.

Links may be made to the EERE Web site from personal and organization Web pages. EERE requests that you link to its site rather than downloading portions of the site to another Web server so viewers will see the most up-to-date information.

There is a commons:Template:PD-USGov-DOE, but I don't know if it applies to NREL publications.

Also see:

USA number one? edit

According to this reference:

{{Google}} finds additional links which confirm this:

See whether I can verify this, and if it is true, work the information into these articles which currently rank Germany first and the United States second:

16:22, 24 August 2008 (UTC): on further reading, I see Germany is still first in terms of installed nameplate capacity, but because U.S. wind farms have stronger winds on average, the U.S. produces more wind energy per year. In other words, the U.S. has a higher average capacity factor for its wind power than Germany does. However, the U.S. is adding new capacity faster than Germany and should overtake it in nameplate capacity in 2009.

01:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC): I edited the lead section of Wind power in the United States and added a new section: Wind power in the United States#The world's top wind producer. There's little point in editing the other articles that rank the U.S. behind Germany in installed capacity, since U.S. capacity will probably top Germany's in 2009. I.e., this ranking ambiguity will resolve itself soon enough when the U.S. tops the world in both nameplate capacity and actual wind energy production.

06:30, 8 May 2009 (UTC): the U.S. has now gained the outright lead in wind power installed nameplate capacity. Other editors have updated several wind power articles to mention that.

USA wind power annual report, 2007 edit

09:04, 31 October 2008 (UTC): This is an interesting reference that I must study, available at at least two URLs:

Wind power in the United States already cites it three times, but uses a bare URL rather than a {{Cite web}} template. I'm fixing that.

07:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC): an interim report for third quarter, 2008:

I could update Wind power in the United States with some interim results, if nobody beats me to it.

Great Plains edit

01:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC): the Great Plains article says nothing about wind power. The history subsection: Great Plains#After 1900 mentions the ongoing population loss in the Great Plains since the 1930s. Wind power development could slow or reverse the population loss, at least in specific areas. T. Boone Pickens cites Sweetwater, Texas as an example. Find some sources and work them into the Great Plains article.

02:21, 25 August 2008 (UTC): I added the new section: Great Plains#Wind power.

Wind power in Ohio edit

Wind power in Ohio already exists, but it is not as complete as it could be. 08:48, 22 December 2008 (UTC): I beefed it up a bit. I still have more material to add, especially information about future wind power development in Lake Erie.

Bowling Green edit

00:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC): Wind power in Ohio does not yet mention Bowling Green, Ohio#Green energy leadership, the site of Ohio's first utility-scale wind farm.

The four turbines are such an oddity that they draw tourists and schoolchildren by the busload to the wind farm, which is next to a landfill. A solar-powered kiosk with a touch screen offers data on the project, wind speed and real time power generation. "We sort of turned the Wood County landfill into a tourist attraction," said Kent Carson of AMP-Ohio, which operates the US$10 million wind farm.

— excerpt from the above reference

05:30, 4 February 2009 (UTC): here are some photos of the wind farm on Picasa that I probably cannot use:

09:07, 4 February 2009 (UTC): I found some photos of the wind farm on a confusing photo-sharing site. Try to figure out the licensing, if any:

I can see the wind farm on Google Maps; the wind turbines are near what looks like the landfill, just west of Bowling Green:

18:07, 2 October 2010 (UTC): another photo of the wind farm to get from Flickr:

NASA Glenn edit

00:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC): The Glenn Research Center (full name: NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field) did pioneering work on some of the first modern large wind turbines, the basis for today's large commercial wind turbines. (At the time, NASA Glenn seems to have been called NASA Lewis.) These were NASA's "Mod" series. Most of the Mod series wind turbines were not actually erected in Ohio, although they could well have been, because Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline is a decent wind resource area.

Search for sources about these NASA wind turbines and add it to the Wind power in Ohio article, and add sources to the History of wind power#20th century section, if possible.

Both searches find many links. Here's one with a diagram showing the relative scale of the Mod-series turbines, along with a listing for each example in the series:

More sources:

For example, here is a photo on http://history.nasa.gov of the Mod-0 wind turbine at Plum Brook station in Ohio:

http://history.nasa.gov lists: Steven J. Dick, NASA Chief Historian. More searching finds more images on Federal Government sites of the wind turbine at Plum Brook:

While poking around, I found this unrelated yet still cool photo of a bald eagle at NASA Glenn's Plum Brook Station:

More of the wind turbine at Plum Brook Station:

NREL has a photographic exchange site, which shows low-resolution photos for free, but it looks like they charge $42 for a high resolution photo.

Ohio wind resource map edit

06:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC): upload this map of Ohio's wind resources to Wikimedia Commons, and add the {{PD-USGov}} template to its description:

I will probably have to convert the original JPEG image to a PNG. I can do that with Netpbm.

That map for Ohio is essentially a single-state version of this wind resource map for the entire United States:

I don't think I have ever uploaded an image to Wikimedia Commons before. Read the article about it and see WP:EIW#Image. If I can figure out how to upload the Ohio wind resource map, I can then upload maps for the other states, or at least the states with significant wind power potential.

The Ohio Wind Resource Explorer page has wind power maps for Ohio at 50m and 100m heights, from AWS Truewind LLC. The 100m map shows wind power up to two classes higher than the 50m map for many areas.

Some sizable areas of wind power class 5 are not too far from where I live, in Logan County, Ohio and Champaign County, Ohio. The Buckeye Wind Project may begin construction there in 2010. See:

In fact, a wind farm might get built there in 2009:

Ohio wind power potential edit

This page says Ohio's wind energy resources are larger than in previous estimates based on 50m elevation, because new technology (i.e., larger wind turbines) can exploit faster winds at 100m:

  • Press Release - New Wind Maps & Analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Reveal Ohio’s Significant Wind Energy Potential Could Power 2 Million Homes

Actually the article claims that Ohio's wind power potential (66,000 megawatts (MW), nameplate capacity? The capacity factor might only be 0.3 or less, although perhaps higher over Lake Erie) exceeds Ohio's current electrical consumption. Determine what Ohio's electricity consumption is. The Ohio article does not seem to mention it; for an example from a neighboring state's article of what the Ohio article might say about Energy, see: Illinois#Energy. Economy of Ohio says nothing about energy, either.

Here is an overview I found:

Ohio's total annual energy consumption appears to be about four quads. Determine how that compares to 66 GW of nameplate capacity. I love unit conversions; see if the {{convert}} template understands quads. Template:Convert/list of units says it understands BTU but not quads. The Quad (energy) article does not give the conversion to TWh. {{convert}} does not seem to understand scientific notation or arbitrary multiples for Imperial units, so just put in all the zeros for a quadrillion (which is 1,000,000,000,000,000):

which equates to an average power of:

(1,200 TWh/yr) * (1000 GW/TW) / (365*24 hours/yr) = 137 GW

That's at least in the ballpark, if it represents total primary power and not just electricity.

Search some more with {{Google}}:

09:10, 3 January 2009 (UTC): another interesting article on energy unit conversions: Cubic mile of oil.

Environment Ohio edit

07:53, 5 August 2009 (UTC): more resources about wind power in Ohio:

Here are the URLs to these papers on the Environment Ohio Web site, so I can make a primary reference that might be less likely to break.

Lake Erie wind power potential edit

A very large portion of Ohio's wind resources are over Lake Erie. Lake Erie may be a good location for offshore wind turbines. As of early 2008, the United States has no offshore wind turbines. Lake Erie might be a good location for them, because:

  • Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes. The western half is especially shallow.
  • Proximity to electrical transmission networks and electricity consumers.
  • Proximity to heavy industry for making large wind turbine components.
  • Ease of transporting large wind turbine components throughout the Great Lakes by barge.

Some links relating to offshore wind power:

Search for references with {{Google}}:

Here's one:

Search further on that term:

05:44, 4 October 2008 (UTC): I stumbled across an interesting report:

This is one of the more informative reports I have found. It discusses the enormous wind power potential of the Great Lakes, it mentions existing and potential pumped hydro power storage plants around the Great Lakes, and discusses the economics of using wind power to assist with the production of biofuels. That last item intrigues me because of the current heavy dependence of agriculture and transportation on petroleum and natural gas. Wind power can boost the ethanol output of a fermentation plant by generating hydrogen via electrolysis, which can then reduce carbon dioxide into methanol, ethanol, and/or methane. Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of fermentation. Currently, the carbon dioxide from fermentation plants does not contribute its carbon to liquid fuels.

23:52, 14 November 2008 (UTC): another news article about interest in the wind power potential of the Great Lakes:

  • "Great Lakes eyed for offshore wind farms". MSNBC, Associated Press. 2008-10-31. Retrieved 2008-11-14., which says, among other things, that a recent (uncited) study found Michigan's portion of the Great Lakes alone could generate 322 GW of (apparently) nameplate capacity from wind.
  • "Momentum Grows for Great Lakes Offshore Wind". NewEnergyNews. 2008-10-31. Retrieved 2008-11-15. - mentions some names involved in studying Great Lakes offshore wind potential (I can search on these for more publications):
    • John Cherry, University of Michigan researcher, Great Lakes Commission;
    • Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (Tom Graf, Land and Water Management Division);
    • Laurie Jodziewicz, siting policy manager, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA);
    • Chris Shafer, professor, Thomas M. Cooley School of Law

23:49, 27 November 2008 (UTC): more about Lake Erie wind power potential, from a monitoring station on the Cleveland Water crib:

Melink Corporation edit

22:48, 20 September 2008 (UTC): a couple of weeks ago, I saw the first large-ish wind turbine I've seen in real life. Evidently it is at the Melink Corporation:

I visited the wind turbine on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2008. The turbine is next to the Melink Corp. building. I was able to ride my bicycle right to a parking lot next to the turbine. An access path goes directly to the turbine tower, but I did not follow it, because nobody was around to give permission. The model may be an Aventa AV-7, 6.5 kW nameplate capacity, rotor diameter 12.8 metres (42 ft):

Vestas V27 at Great Lakes Science Center edit

The Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland installed a Vestas V27 wind turbine (nameplate capacity: 225 kW) in 2006 between the Cleveland Browns Stadium and the Science Center. Vestas no longer manufactures the V27, as it is now below the minimum economic size for modern commercial wind farms. The Science Center purchased a used turbine from a wind farm operator in Denmark which replaced the turbine with a larger model. Enexco in California reconditioned the turbine, and White Construction from Indiana erected it on the new site.

Find some sources and work this into the Wind power in Ohio article.

I mentioned this turbine in Unconventional wind turbines#Wind turbines on public display.

07:25, 15 December 2008 (UTC): The Great Lakes Science Center broke the above link. Google still has a cached copy, the text of which I am saving as an HTML comment. I should have figured out how to save this with WebCite.

Search for similar urban/demonstration turbines:

See also my notes in #Wind turbines on public display below.

08:38, 16 December 2008 (UTC): additional photos of this wind turbine are on Flickr, usually mistitled as "windmill" because the photographers are not wind power experts.

19:17, 18 December 2008 (UTC): I found some more information about the display ground around the wind turbine. The base of the wind turbine tower has a sign with a caption that is less than perfectly coherent (and also displays a copyright notice - boo, hiss). Here is a photo from Flickr showing the sign (I can't use the Flickr photo because it has a noncommercial license):

This page from the GLSC site explains what the display is about, and in light of which the oddball struggling-to-be-artistically-cool sign caption becomes somewhat understandable:

I will upload this photo to Commons, since it features the wind turbine:

Images of wind turbines in Ohio edit

00:29, 29 October 2008 (UTC): search for images of wind turbines in Ohio, and use them to dress up the Wind power in Ohio article, which is rather bleak at the moment with no photos. Using my search methods in User:Teratornis/Notes#Image search, I found these images:

Here is an historical image of one of the world's first electricity-generating wind turbines, by Charles Brush in Cleveland, Ohio:

21:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC): I created commons:Category:Wind power in Ohio and I'm categorizing all the wind power in Ohio images I know of.

07:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC): here is a photo of the Vestas V27 at the Great Lakes Science Center, from 2006 shortly after installation, before the art display went in around the base:

Cuyahoga County offshore wind project edit

08:44, 24 November 2008 (UTC): look into this:

Eden Park wind turbine edit
  • 39°07′01″N 84°29′38″W / 39.117009°N 84.493929°W / 39.117009; -84.493929
  • "2008 Cincinnati Metro Solar Tour Guidebook" (PDF). GreenEnergyOhio.org.
    • "The 10 kW Bergey Excel wind generator was installed in April 2007 on a 120-foot-tall tower on a hill above the Administration building. The solar and wind energy systems were installed by Third Sun Solar and Wind Power and supply about 20 percent of the building’s electrical needs; the rest comes from Duke Energy."
      • I've seen the wind turbine from what I thought was fairly close, and I would never have guessed the tower is 120 feet tall. The wind turbine is barely higher than the surrounding trees, and I did not think the trees were huge. I will have to scout the site more accurately. I was only able to view the wind turbine from a locked gate at a parking lot entrance, which is a fair distance from the wind turbine. The Bergey site says: "The BWC EXCEL is a modern 6.7 meter (22 ft) diameter, 10,000W wind turbine". Since the wind turbine looks very small in proportion to the tower, I guess 120 feet for the tower (5.545 rotor diameters) is within reason. It's too bad they couldn't mount the wind turbine on top of the 192.3 metres (631 ft) radio antenna next to it.

Bergey wind turbines allegedly survive tornadoes.

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Bergey WindPower under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa - that finds no free images. But I did find an unfree (cc-by-noncommercial) image of another wind turbine in a park, in Jerome, Ohio.
Glacier Ridge Metro Park wind turbine edit
Buckeye Wind Project edit

18:17, 23 July 2009 (UTC): this seems to be progressing. See:

Determine where this will be, with more precision, so I can add a pushpin to a locator map in the Wind power in Ohio article.

I see a bunch of sources, but none of them say exactly where the wind farm is going to be, other than in Champaign County. For now I'll put it on the locator map at the county center.

This source is somewhat more specific:

"The proposed wind farm will be located in Champaign County, East of Urbana on a high ridge of land

oftentimes referred to as “the roof of Ohio.” Many of the turbines should be visible from St Route 33

near the popular ski area, Mad River Mountain."

There seems to be an anti-wind group opposing the wind farm, and at least one pro-wind group supporting it. Here is a report evaluating the dispute:

22:30, 8 August 2009 (UTC): this page from the application on file at the Ohio Power Siting Board has many details about the project: 

Date Filed:      4/24/2009 11:27:37 AM
Document Type:   APP-Application
Number of pages: 201
Case Numbers:    08-0666-EL-BGN
Summary: Application for a certificate of environmental compatibility and public need for 
the Buckeye Wind Project in the Townships of Goshen, Rush, Salem, Union, Urbana, and Wayne, 
Champaign County, Ohio by H. Petricoff. (Part 1 of 7)
  • Table 06-2 on page 78 of this report shows the estimated reductions in annual emissions from the wind farm.
  • Another section of the application shows a lot of maps. However, they are mostly illegible photocopies, and they don't give coordinates.

Exhibit A of the application mentions Nordex N100, Nordex N90, and REpower MM92 wind turbines and copies manufacturer literature for the specifications.

Hardin Wind Project edit

21:54, 8 August 2009 (UTC): this appears to be the second proposed Ohio wind project currently with an application on file:

Economy of Ohio edit

23:11, 29 January 2010 (UTC): Economy of Ohio#Wind has some information that overlaps with Wind power in Ohio. I linked the two articles together, with a {{See}} template in the former, and a See also link in the latter. Examine the Economy of Ohio#Wind section, and see that it properly summarizes the Wind power in Ohio article.

Some projects move ahead edit

Governor Ted Strickland and Senator Sherrod Brown appeared at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio to announce the approval of several wind farm projects in Ohio.

05:47, 3 October 2010 (UTC): more references:

Fayette Schools edit

Also, update the Wind power in Ohio article with some additional small wind power projects. See the AWEA project page for Ohio.

North Dakota edit

08:52, 24 November 2008 (UTC): North Dakota is America's windiest state. Its wind power development lags several other states, probably due to its sparse population and lower industrial and infrastructural development, but eventually North Dakota could be the top wind producer in the U.S. A reference:

Wind power in Wyoming edit

Wyoming Wind Energy Center edit

00:57, 4 December 2008 (UTC): while I was sorting images of wind turbines, I ran across an image that turns out to (probably) be of the Wyoming Wind Energy Center outside of Evanston, Wyoming in Uinta County:

Other possibilities include two new wind farms in Fort Bridger, Wyoming, also in Uinta County:

To-do: make {{Cite web}} templates for the many sources I found for this wind farm. At the moment, Wikipedia does not appear to have an article about this wind farm:

I might just add a mention of the wind farm to either the city or the county article, rather than create a new standalone article. But I'll look at the sources and see if they justify a new article. Wind farm articles tend to attract message templates questioning their notability, unless you can write more than a paragraph of real content.

Wind power in Texas edit

06:54, 12 December 2008 (UTC): I've made a few edits to Wind power in Texas. Make some more.

Commons only seemed to have about three photos of wind turbines in Texas. This is after I sorted through hundreds of photos on Commons, and I moved a few dozen wind power photos from the English Wikipedia to Commons. Texas seems oddly underrepresented, given its amount of wind power and the fact that Texans speak a dialect of English. The United Kingdom has less installed wind power capacity, yet commons:Category:Wind power in the United Kingdom has dozens of photos. I guess wind turbines in the U.K. are in much closer proximity to what we could call modern civilization than they are in Texas.

I made a new category on Commons: commons:Category:Wind power in Texas as a subcategory of the existing commons:Category:Wind power in the United States. I was able to find a few more images to recategorize into it, but still much fewer than in, say, commons:Category:Wind power in California. I added a {{Commonscat}} template to Wind power in Texas.

The Pickens Plan article has another photo I had not yet moved to Commons, so I moved it:

Still to do: maybe add a section: Wind power in Texas#Wind turbines on public display. Use information from the section I made earlier: Unconventional wind turbines#Wind turbines on public display.

Search the other language Wikipedias for images of wind power in Texas. Foreign companies built several wind farms in Texas, so maybe some engineers from Denmark, Germany, or Spain took some photos in Texas and uploaded them to their native language Wikipedias. If nothing else, see if Wind power in Texas has any other language versions we can add Interlanguage links to.

More photos of wind power in Texas are on Flickr. Figure out how to search Flickr for photos that have a Commons-compatible license. See my notes in User:Teratornis/Notes#Flickr.

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm texas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine texas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power texas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill texas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Those searches find quite a few interesting images, although the locations for some are not clear. But here are two with a clear location, they are architectural drawings of the Discovery Tower to be built in Houston:

I strongly suspect the uploader did not have permission to upload them under the license he/she used.

Here is a whole photoset of wind turbines in Texas, but not all are under a usable license:

Here are some geocoded aerial photos of wind farms:

And a photo showing wind turbines unloaded at Corpus Christi, Texas, awaiting shipment to somewhere:

09:08, 13 January 2009 (UTC): I found some photos from Muenster, Texas:

This wind farm is evidently new:

and the name looks like the Wolf Ridge Wind Farm. Here's a YouTube video about it:

Flickr has quite a few more photos of wind farms in Texas, but unfortunately most of them have no information about their location that I can decode. It will be nice if cameras get GPS receivers and automatically geotag the camera locations in their EXIF data.

09:43, 4 February 2009 (UTC): some more photos from Flickr:

Wind power in Kansas edit

04:25, 3 January 2009 (UTC): I might start a Wind power in Kansas article. According to the AWEA, as of 2008-11-19, Kansas had 465 MW of wind power nameplate capacity installed, and 548.5 MW under construction. Kansas ranks third among U.S. states for wind resources, after North Dakota and Texas.

YouTube has some videos of wind farms in Kansas:

Flickr has some photos:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm kansas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine kansas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power kansas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill kansas under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Some references:

Wikipedia has some stubby articles about wind farms in Kansas:

and some missing articles:

Articles that mention wind power in Kansas:

Articles that should mention wind power in Kansas:

09:14, 4 January 2009 (UTC): I made a commons:Category:Wind power in Kansas, but I did not find any photos already in commons:Category:Wind power in the United States nor in commons:Category:Wind farms in the United States depicting wind power in Kansas. Therefore, any such images I upload may well be the first on Commons (unless I missed them in my recent search through all the wind power photos).

Wind power in Hawaii edit

04:25, 3 January 2009 (UTC): I might start a Wind power in Hawaii article. According to the AWEA, as of 2008-11-19, Hawaii had 63.12 MW of wind power nameplate capacity installed, and 0 MW under construction.

YouTube has some videos of wind farms in Hawaii:

Flickr has some photos:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm hawaii under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine hawaii under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power hawaii under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill hawaii under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Some references:

Wikipedia has no articles specifically about wind farms in Hawaii yet. Other articles that mention Search Wikipedia with Google for: wind power in Hawaii:

09:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC): I created: commons:Category:Wind power in Hawaii. It's a little lonely just yet with only two photos that I could find already on Commons. I will upload some more.

Wind power in Iowa, Maine, Oregon edit

05:31, 4 January 2009 (UTC): these articles already exist:

but they don't have all of the nice features as Wind power in Ohio and Wind power in Texas. Work on bringing up the other articles to the same standard. On the other hand, Wind power in Maine has a locator map; I could add similar maps to the other Wind power by state articles. Here are the [[AWEA references for wind power projects in those three states:

I created the corresponding categories for photos on Commons:

I found some photos already on Commons for Iowa and Oregon, but none for Maine. See if Flickr has any:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Maine under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Maine under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Maine under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Maine under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Those searches find a total of 8 relevant photos, all by the same user, and all of the Mars Hill Wind Farm:

07:49, 5 January 2009 (UTC): The Flickr user did not geotag his photos, but the location of Mars Hill (the mountain) is: 46°31′16″N 67°48′49″W / 46.521111°N 67.813611°W / 46.521111; -67.813611. Wikipedia already had a photo of Mars Hill (Maine) (the mountain) near the town of Mars Hill, Maine before the wind farm went up:

I uploaded all of those Mars Hill photos to: commons:Category:Wind power in Maine.

I might as well see what Flickr has for Iowa and Oregon:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Iowa under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Iowa under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Iowa under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Iowa under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Lots of photos for Iowa for me to sort through. Here's one that clearly shows the visitor kiosk of the Hancock County Wind Center (which looks suspiciously similar to the visitor kiosk for the Gray County Wind Farm near Montezuma, Kansas, also owned by FPL Energy):

So I guess FPL Energy uses a standard visitor kiosk design for at least two of its wind farms. Therefore, it probably has more like these.

20:21, 10 May 2009 (UTC): Here are some photos of (probably) Storm Lake I (145 * 750 kW = 108.75 MW) and/or Storm Lake II (106 * 750 kW = 79.5 MW), with old Zond wind turbines on lattice towers, from 1999:

The Flickr captions say:

  • "A portion of the World's largest windfarm. 259 wind turbines over 200 feet tall located in Cherokee and Buena Vista Counties in Northwestern Iowa. Together they produce 192,750 kW of energy (sic)."

That does not quite agree with the numbers from the American Wind Energy Association site. Maybe the farm has decommissioned some of its old wind turbines since the 1999 installation date, and not replaced them with newer wind turbines (Zond is no longer in business).

Reference:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Oregon under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Oregon under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Oregon under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Oregon under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Flickr also has some photos from Oregon, such as this one which the uploader even geocoded:

and these others with no geocoding:

I'm guessing this photo is also of the Stateline Wind Project:

The photo of wind turbines is between a photo in Idaho and a photo in Oregon, and the Stateline Wind Project is in the right location to be on the road trip map in the photo set sequence.

Wind power in Nebraska edit

08:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC): see what photos Flickr has for the remaining Great Plains states. Three with large wind power potential:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Nebraska under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Nebraska under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Nebraska under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Nebraska under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Rather amazingly, the above searches only show one photo with a modern wind turbine, and not very many photos with old windmills either.

Wind power in New York edit

20:51, 26 September 2009 (UTC): See what photos Flickr has:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm New York under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power New York under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine New York under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill New York under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
Latitude	42 32.788
Longitude	-077 30.108
 
Calculated Values
Position Type	Lat Lon
Degrees Lat Long 	42.5464667°, -077.5018000°
Degrees Minutes	42°32.78800', -077°30.10800'
Degrees Minutes Seconds 	42°32'47.2801", -077°30'06.4800"
GEOREF	GJNN29893278
UTM	18T 294583mE 4713486mN
MGRS	18TTN9458313486
Grid North	-1.7°

Here are some wind power in New York photos I can upload from Flickr:

Steel Winds, Clipper Windpower edit

08:04, 9 October 2008 (UTC): Steel Winds had problems with its Clipper Windpower turbines:

Neither article mentions these problems; WP:NPOV requires that we present unflattering facts as well as press-release material.

Maple Ridge wind farm edit

05:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC): here's an interesting video about the Maple Ridge wind farm in Lewis County, New York:

The video features the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers linemen and electricians who installed the wiring for the turbines.

The farm is a project of Horizon Wind Energy and PPM Energy. Look up the specific model of turbines on the farm. They sound like Vestas V80s, except that their nameplate rating of 1.65 MW according to the Maple Ridge wind farm article does not match with the capacities for V80s in Vestas#Products.

Currently, Vestas offers a V82-1.65 MW model:

That sounds like what the Maple Ridge wind farm is running.

Wind power in South Dakota edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm South Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power South Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine South Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill South Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

The above searches find only one photo with a modern wind turbine, and it contains zero clues about the location:

As usual, the non-free photo versions of the above searches find dozens of results. More than 50 for the wind farm South Dakota search. This is yet another instance of how the vast majority of people who upload wind turbine photos to Flickr do not use a free license.

08:12, 23 January 2009 (UTC): I found some U.S. government photos about a wind turbine on the Rosebud Indian Reservation I can upload:

Wind power in North Dakota edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm North Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power North Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine North Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill North Dakota under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

The above searches only find 3 or 4 usable photos, including one that was already on Commons, but in a lower resolution:

  • File:LMGlasfiberBlade.jpg
    • Original photo: http://flickr.com/photos/tuey/332361446/ which by the way is geotagged, but the Commons photo does not have the commons:Template:Location, so I will add it. 22:27, 6 January 2009 (UTC): except that Flinfo is down right now, making it slightly harder than necessary to recover the location information from the photo. Actually it wasn't bad; clicking on the Flickr "map" link displays a Yahoo map, which nicely displays coordinates in DMS and decimal degrees formats, which I could copy and paste.

These other photos from North Dakota look possibly usable:

Evidently the northern Plains states don't have a lot of computer-savvy people to take pictures and upload them to Flickr.

Ashtabula Wind Farm edit

21:25, 13 December 2008 (UTC): Ashtabula Wind Farm is a red link in List of wind farms at the moment. Here is some information about it:

and a YouTube video about it:

Wind power in Pennsylvania edit

  Done I'm trying to figure out what wind farm this is a picture of:

The photo shows a long line of at least 19 wind turbines on a ridge. According to the original uploader's caption:

Here are the possibilities:

There were four wind farms in Pennsylvania with 20 or more wind turbines in 2007:

At first, the mention of Allegheny Front had me thinking Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm, but that's in Cambria and Blair counties near Altoona, which is not exactly "southern" Pennsylvania, but more like "western central". Also, this video shows a very different wind turbine layout:

Thus the photo is probably of the Casselman or Meyersdale wind projects. Meyersdale is looking somewhat probable, as it is near the southern border of Pennsylvania:

The 30 MW Meyersdale Wind Power Project, developed in partnership with Atlantic Renewable Energy (now Iberdrola), is located in the Casselman River Valley in the shadow of Mt. Davis, the highest point in Pennsylvania. The geography of Meyersdale makes it the most energetic wind sites in Pennsylvania. The 20 1.5 MW GE sle turbines are spread across nearly 3000 acres on top of a ridgeline populated with trees in Somerset County, in an area known for especially good wind resource. Each tower is 262 feet tall, with the three blades each measuring 116 feet long. The project provides enough power for 15,000 Pennsylvania homes.

Here's a copyrighted photo on Flickr, among several nice photos of the Meyersdale Wind Project:

The Google Maps aerial photo of the Meyersdale Wind Project makes it pretty clear that this is what File:Wind Farm PA.jpg depicts.

See if anyone on Flickr has uploaded wind farm photos with coordinates, under free licenses:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Pennsylvania under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Pennsylvania under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Pennsylvania under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Pennsylvania under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

The city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in Somerset County has a Gamesa wind turbine blade manufacturing plant. That would explain all the Gamesa wind turbines in wind farms in the area. Evidently Gamesa had some problems with the glue on their blades failing in 2007.

More references:

03:12, 12 January 2009 (UTC): identifying some poorly labeled wind farm photos from Flickr:

This photo is most likely of the Waymart Wind Farm, near Waymart, Pennsylvania:

21:50, 21 June 2009 (UTC): User:Kubina uploaded a photo of wind turbines in Pa. and he geocoded his photo:

I don't see the photo in Commons:Category:Wind power in Pennsylvania yet, so I might upload it later. The location of the photo suggests it is of the Somerset Wind Farm.

19:03, 6 March 2010 (UTC): here is a KML file which might show the wind farms in Pennsylvania as of sometime in 2008:

This is the html version of the file http://tech.reumer.net/images/PennsylvaniaWindFarmMap.kml. Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.

Copy the data about wind farms from it: 

Name = Forward Wind Farm
Location = Stoystown
Latitude = 40 05'30.59"n
Longitude = 78 51'49.02"w
MWe = 29.4
Units = 14
Turbines = Suzlon
Developer = Edison Mission Group
Owner = Edison Mission Group
Power_Purchaser = Unk
Year_Online = 2008

Name = Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm
Location = Ebensburg
Latitude = 40 29'09.52"n
Longitude = 78 45'57.93"w
MWe = 80
Units = 40
Turbines = Gamesa
Developer = Gamesa
Owner = Babcock & Brown
Power_Purchaser = First Energy Corp
Year_Online = 2007
Web_Links = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_Ridge_Wind_Farm

Name = Casselman Wind Project
Location = Garrett
Latitude = 39 52'21.95"n
Longitude = 79 08'09.46"w
MWe = 34.5
Units = 23
Turbines = GE
Developer = PPM Energy
Owner = Iberdrola Renewables
Power_Purchaser = First Energy Corp
Year_Online = 2007
Web_Links = http://www.ppmenergy.com/cs_casselman.html

Name = Locust Ridge Wind Farm
Location = Mahanoy City
Latitude = 40 50'44.76"n
Longitude = 76 08'50.87"w
MWe = 26
Units = 13
Turbines = Gamesa
Developer = Community Energy
Owner = Noble Environmental
Power_Purchaser = PPL Corp
Year_Online = 2006

Name = Bear Creek Wind Farm
Location = Bear Creek
Latitude = 41 10'30.08"n
Longitude = 75 46'09.60"w
MWe = 24
Units = 12
Turbines = Gamesa
Developer = CEI Iberdrola
Owner = Babcock & Brown
Power_Purchaser = PPL Corp
Year_Online = 2006

Name = Meyersdale Wind Farm
Location = Meyersdale
Latitude = 39 47'22.07"n
Longitude = 79 00'13.43"w
MWe = 30
Units = 20
Turbines = NEG Micon
Developer = Atlantic Renewable Energy
Owner = FPL Energy
Power_Purchaser = First Energy Corp
Year_Online = 2003

Name = Waymart Wind Farm
Location = Waymart
Latitude = 41 33'40.21"n
Longitude = 75 26'51.93"w
MWe = 64.5
Units = 43
Turbines = GE
Developer = Atlantic Renewable Energy
Owner = FPL Energy
Power_Purchaser = Exelon
Year_Online = 2003

Name = Mill Run Wind Power Project
Location = Mill Run
Latitude = 39 56'58.05"n
Longitude = 79 26'34.61"w
MWe = 15
Units = 10
Turbines = GE
Developer = Atlantic Renewable Energy
Owner = FPL Energy
Power_Purchaser = Exelon
Year_Online = 2001

Name = Somerset Wind Power Project
Location = Somerset
Latitude = 39 58'52.34"n
Longitude = 79 00'32.68"w
MWe = 9
Units = 6
Turbines = GE
Developer = Atlantic Renewable Energy
Owner = FPL Energy
Power_Purchaser = Exelon
Year_Online = 2001

Name = Green Mountain Wind Farm
Location = Garrett
Latitude = 39 50'58.13"n
Longitude = 79 04'06.11"w
MWe = 10.4
Units = 8
Turbines = Nordex
Developer = Atlantic Renewable Energy
Owner = FPL Energy
Power_Purchaser = Green Mountain Energy
Year_Online = 2000

I tried to open the KML file in Quantum GIS. Supposedly this is possible with OGR converter plug-in. But I could not get it to work.

Wind power in Michigan edit

04:11, 19 January 2009 (UTC): just now, commons:Category:Wind power in Michigan has no images. See if Flickr has any:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Michigan under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Michigan under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Michigan under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Michigan under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
Stoney Corners wind farm edit

02:43, 6 September 2008 (UTC): here are some links about the Stoney Corners wind farm in McBain, Michigan:

The American Wind Energy Association maintains a database of wind power projects. Here is the page for Michigan:

but it does not seem to list the Stoney Corners wind farm.

Wind power in Colorado edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Colorado under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Colorado under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Colorado under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Colorado under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

23:28, 20 January 2009 (UTC): those searches do not find much. I only see two photos of modern wind turbines in Colorado. Neither one gives the precise location, but both probably depict wind turbines somewhere in the southeast quadrant of Colorado which has seen some wind power development.

One or both photos might be of the Twin Buttes Wind Farm or the Colorado Green Wind Farm near Lamar, Colorado.

I found some other photos of wind turbines probably in Colorado, in the results of other searches (such as for wind power in Oklahoma):

This photo shows wind turbines with Suzlon on their nacelles, and the caption claims the photo is in Colorado, but I don't see any wind farms listed on the AWEA Colorado page that have Suzlon wind turbines. A Google search was also fruitless. Maybe the photo is really in Texas. Suzlon's site does not mention any projects in Colorado, but I don't know whether the site tries to be exhaustive:

... agreements with Edison Mission Group (EMG) of Irvine, California and after repeat orders EMG holds more than 630 MW of Suzlon wind turbine capacity in the United States. Similarly Suzlon's relationship with John Deere Wind Energy (JDWE) started with its investment in several Minnesota wind power projects, but quickly expanded to Texas and recently Missouri. We have also signed a contract with Tierra Energy of Austin, Texas to provide 42 units of the S88-2.1 MW wind turbine for projects located in Wyoming and Texas. Suzlon’s contract with PPM Energy, a leader in optimized wind energy solutions, calls for delivery of 700 MW over the next few years.

Wind power in Montana edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Montana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Montana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Montana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Montana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

The searches find two photos, neither is clear about the location:

Flickr has 34 images of the Judith Gap Wind Farm when I search for the name with no license restrictions:

See if any are free:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Judith Gap Wind Farm under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

The search for free images finds zero. What is wrong with people? Why do they copyright photos that they upload to Flickr? All that does is prevent some people from seeing their photos. They are already giving away their work. Why gum it up with pointless copyright restrictions?

Wind power in Oklahoma edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Oklahoma under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Oklahoma under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Oklahoma under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Oklahoma under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Those searches find quite a few photos; some are even geotagged. I like these photos of a wind turbine blade on public display at Weatherford, Oklahoma:

Wind power in Rhode Island edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Rhode Island under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Rhode Island under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Rhode Island under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Rhode Island under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Portsmouth Abbey School under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

According to the AWEA site, the only utility-scale wind power installation in Rhode Island is at the Portsmouth Abbey School, a Vestas wind turbine with 660 kW nameplate capacity, which means it is probably a V47, like the one at Hull, Massachusetts. I wouldn't expect to find photos on Flickr with only one possible wind turbine to photograph in the whole state, but it's worth a look. If nothing else, I can address the {{Fact}} template that someone stuck in the article by adding a reference. Here are some non-free photos of the wind turbine:

Ah, but then the U.S. Federal Government comes to the rescue with an image I can upload to Commons with PD-USGOV:

Wind power in Massachusetts edit

08:50, 25 January 2009 (UTC): I've already uploaded some photos relating to Wind power in Massachusetts. See commons:Category:Wind power in Massachusetts. See if I can find any more.

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Massachusetts under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Massachusetts under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Massachusetts under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Massachusetts under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Holy Name Central Catholic High School has a Vestas RRB PS47-600kW wind turbine. Vestas RRB is a wholly independent licensee of Vestas, based in India. The PS47 is basically the Vestas V47 model, which Vestas Wind Systems proper no longer manufactures.

Vestas RRB India Ltd. has been pioneering the cause of wind power in India since 1987. Vestas RRB is a 100% independent manufacturer of wind turbines, in India. It has a license from Vestas Denmark and a technology transfer agreement for this successful wind turbine type. This turbine type, basically the Vestas V47, pitch regulated, is continuously produced and therefore almost single in its kW-range. World Wide Wind Turbines (WWWT) has a clear and open supply line for this product. Call us for more information.

Massachusetts seems to have an unusual number of sizable customer-sited wind power projects, I guess because the state is densely populated and thus has little room for onshore wind farms.

02:34, 4 February 2009 (UTC): here are some reasonably good photos of the IBEW wind turbine in Boston:

However, the photo is on Photobucket which probably means we cannot upload it to Commons. I would have to convince the photo's owner to post it on Flickr under a suitably free license, so I could upload it from there to Commons.

22:09, 15 October 2009 (UTC): a source about the Vestas wind turbines in Hull, Massachusetts:

Wind power in Indiana edit

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Indiana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Indiana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Indiana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Indiana under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Some links about wind power in Benton County, Indiana (e.g., the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm and the Benton County Wind Farm):

Here are some photos to upload from Flickr to Commons:

21:29, 21 June 2009 (UTC): I edited these articles a little:

I asked the uploader to clarify the camera location of File:Benton County wind turbines.png. I think that is a photo of the Benton County Wind Farm, but at the moment the photo illustrates the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm article. I uploaded some photos of Fowler Ridge from Flickr, and I found some more to upload. See Commons:Category:Fowler Ridge Wind Farm. I will straighten out the photos later.

Meadow Lake Wind Farm edit

19:31, 16 March 2010 (UTC): I found a map showing the layout of the Meadow Lake Wind Farm in a PDF file linked from this page:

The PDF file looks like a scan of a printed document from Horizon Wind Energy, the wind farm developer:

The document and the site display no notice of copyright, so assume they are copyrighted. Maybe I could draw my own version of the map in Quantum GIS, which I have been looking at recently. Steps:

  1. Figure out how to print the map to a PNG from the PDF file, perhaps using Ghostscript under Cygwin, or perhaps it would be easier to just take a screenshot of the page with the map.
  2. Rotate the map 90 degrees since it is printed sideways in the PDF file.
  3. Load the map into a raster layer in QGIS, somehow.
  4. Install the OpenStreetMap plug-in in QGIS.
  5. Download OpenStreetMap data for Indiana, or at least for the subset of Indiana covered by the map.
  6. Line up the raster map layer over the OpenStreetMap layer in a compatible projection (maybe equirectangular projection since that is standard for online mapping software, and the map region spans only a few counties so spatial distortions are likely to be minor).
  7. Edit a new vector map layer, digitizing from the windfarm layout polygons on the PNG from the PDF file.
  8. Generate an SVG map combining my vector layer with the OpenStreetMap layer as a base map.
  9. Maybe pretty up the SVG map in Inkscape.
Wiser Indiana edit

Wiser Indiana is a renewable energy advocacy group. Study their site and see if it contains any information useful in Wikipedia articles.

Sources edit

19:42, 20 March 2010 (UTC): some sources I ran across which I might work into the various Wind power in Indiana articles:

There are lots more news sources about these wind turbines that just went online. They are two-bladed 1 MW wind turbines by Nordic WindPower, which was funded by Vinod Khosla. This looks interesting.

More information is available for the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm than is currently in the article. Work some of this in:


Wind power in Arizona edit

Dry Lake Wind Power Project edit

09:21, 4 May 2010 (UTC): Some notes about an article I'm starting:

That news article suggests the wind farm might be somewhere along Arizona State Route 377 between Holbrook, Arizona and Heber-Overgaard, Arizona in Navajo County. That would put the location roughly here: 34°37′43″N 110°21′57″W / 34.628547°N 110.365906°W / 34.628547; -110.365906, where there happens to be a feature called Dry Lake. The article seems to suggest that the wind farm is close enough to the Cholla Power Plant for the wind turbines and the power plant smokestacks to be visible on the horizon together. Given that these structures are tall enough to be visible for miles across a plain, this is plausible.

This user might be working on the same article: User:Calmer Waters/text user page2.

06:52, 6 May 2010 (UTC): Look for freely-licensed photos with {{Flickr free}}:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: dry lake wind power project under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power arizona under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm arizona under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill arizona under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Nothing so far.

This reference gives a better idea of the location (wouldn't it be great if journalists could figure out what coordinates are, so they could specify locations precisely and unambiguously?):

Excerpt:

  • "When permitted, the Dry Lake 2 Wind Project will be located approximately seven miles northwest of Snowflake on a combination of private and state lands. The project will be just west of Arizona State Highway 77 three miles east of Dry Lake 1, south of Holbrook and the I-40 corridor."

That would put phase 2 about here:

and phase 1 about here:

Offshore edit

21:28, 29 April 2010 (UTC): the US still has no offshore wind farms, but Cape Wind just got approved.

This map shows the US offshore wind projects in planning:

We have a {{Location map USA West}} but no {{Location map USA East}} yet. I might create the latter so I can show the locations of these wind farm projects on Wikipedia.

Wind power on campus edit

04:51, 1 October 2010 (UTC): a list of universities in the US and Canada (mostly) which have wind turbines on campus, or are associated with wind farm projects:

  • "Wind Power on Campus". Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-01.

The page does not list this wind turbine: File:North American Wind Research and Training Center 3483764965.jpg of the Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Categories edit

22:56, 6 October 2009 (UTC): Category:Wind power in the United States by state only had subcategories for two states just now. I added Category:Wind power in Vermont. We should have a subcategory for each state that has wind power articles. That would make it easier to write the remaining "Wind power in state" articles that do not exist yet.

Wind power in the United Kingdom edit

Interactive Map of Renewable and Alternative Energy Projects in the UK edit

21:01, 4 October 2009 (UTC): here is a very nice interactive map of (apparently) all the major renewable energy projects in the UK:

This is useful for identifying otherwise mysterious photos of wind turbines in the UK that various users on Wikipedia and Commons upload without specific information. For example:

The site links to Wikipedia articles, too, such as Royal Seaforth Dock. Some of these articles lack complete information about the renewable energy facilities in or near their locations. So check the articles and beef up their coverage. That way we can improve the value of the Interactive Map, by giving it better Wikipedia articles to link to.

Special:Linksearch shows nobody besides me linking to this site as of 03:43, 7 October 2009 (UTC).

Wind power in Scotland edit

08:52, 25 January 2009 (UTC): The following searches are productive:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm Scotland under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power Scotland under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine Scotland under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: windmill Scotland under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

A few of these photos are already on Commons, but not most of them. See commons:Category:Wind power in Scotland.

St John Bosco Primary School edit

While sorting more wind turbine photos on Commons, I ran across an article (St John Bosco Primary School) that should contain one of the photos, but does not yet. The article already has some cleanup templates that someone else placed on it. I might get around to cleaning up the article with these resources:

George Monbiot grills the wind-NIMBY edit

09:36, 18 December 2008 (UTC): George Monbiot asks Shaun Spiers of the Campaign to Protect Rural England why his organization has opposed more than half of wind farm projects in the United Kingdom, but has not protested once against an opencast coal mine in the past five years:

Template:Infobox wind farm edit

I'm thinking about making a {{Infobox wind farm}}. Currently there isn't one. (20:22, 5 September 2010 (UTC): another user created the template.) There is a {{Infobox power station}} which comes close, and appears in some wind farm articles. Maybe wind farms could use their own infobox. The infobox wind farm fields could include:

  • Name
  • Image
  • Owner
  • Location (lat/lon)
  • City
  • State
  • Country
  • Start date
  • Completion date
  • Nameplate capacity, MW
  • Annual output, MW·h
  • Capacity factor
  • Number of wind turbines
  • Wind turbine manufacturer(s)
  • Wind turbine model(s)
  • Energy storage system

But first I will look at examples of {{Infobox power station}} in these wind farm articles:

User:Arsenikk started all of those articles. It does look like {{Infobox power station}} lacks some fields we might like to include for a wind farm. There are dozens of wind farms in the world, the number is growing rapidly, and we could ultimately have thousands of wind farm articles. Therefore, a separate infobox for wind farms seems justifiable, since it would add some value.

Template:Wind power edit

The wind power articles could use more navigation templates. There is no navigation template in Category:Energy templates specifically for Wind power. I will start by making a general one: {{Wind power}} to add to the major wind power articles. Existing templates which are similar or overlapping:

Later I might make additional navigation templates, for example to list the wind farms in various geographic areas, breaking it down into whatever regions can fit on a single template. That will depend on how many wind farms exist in a given continent, country, or state/province. As the wind industry continues to boom, the number of wind farms must eventually become enormous. The U.S. needs at least a million large wind turbines to make a dent in electricity demand and displace some significant amount of fossil fuel consumption.

As usual, start editing the template in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2. The categories to consider:

Naturally, while looking around the wind-related categories, I find a lot of articles that need work:

The Wind power article does not mention Kites currently. Kites have applications in load-lifting and ship propulsion. These are of course technologies for harnessing wind power.

19:27, 12 April 2008 (UTC): I got {{Wind power}} into preliminary shape so I created the template proper.

Baseload power edit

18:19, 3 September 2008 (UTC): a common objection to wind power is its intermittency. Wind power#Capacity factor cites this source:

which mentions a journal paper. Find the journal reference, if possible, with {{Google scholar cite}}:

That finds the result:

Cranes edit

07:46, 7 September 2008 (UTC): does Wikipedia document the cranes for erecting wind turbines? I stumbled across this Web page about the Manitowoc GTK1100 crane, specifically designed for wind farm construction and maintenance:

  • "Manitowoc Wind Power Crane". Alternative Energy. 2007-05-15. Retrieved 2008-09-07.
    • "Wind power is one of the fastest-growing areas for the lifting industry."

I already added that reference to The Manitowoc Company. See what else Wikipedia already says, or might yet need to say, about cranes for wind farm construction.

Replacing petroleum with wind power edit

18:45, 21 September 2008 (UTC): a common objection to wind power by wind power opponents is that wind power does not significantly reduce petroleum consumption. For example:

The above essay appeared several years before the Pickens Plan, a proposal to use wind power to reduce natural gas for power generation, allowing the saved natural gas to power transportation.

The Environmental effects of wind power#Net energy gain section does not address this objection, because it muddies the practical distinctions between different kinds of energy by taking them all as equivalent. Net energy gain analysis seems to be a crude first-order comparison, because it does not consider whether the form(s) of energy produced by a given technology can actually replace (and therefore "pay back") the specific forms of energy required to implement the technology. In practice, not all forms of energy are mutually fungible because of thermodynamic and engineering limitations. For example, there are many practical technologies for converting various forms of energy into electricity, but only a few sources of energy have the energy density and portability to make them practical to power transportation. Thus the transportation sector overwhelmingly depends on liquid fuels as of 2008, and most of these liquid fuels come from petroleum (with a small but growing fraction from biofuels). Since every form of commercial-scale power generation requires transportation of parts, equipment, and skilled labor during its construction and operation, every form of commercial-scale power generation is a net consumer of petroleum. When petroleum was cheap and abundant, this wasn't much of a concern, but as of 2008 petroleum has grown increasingly scarce, expensive, and insecure. Petroleum might be the form of energy one most wants to conserve, and the net energy gain for a particular technology won't necessarily say anything about that technology's impact on petroleum use.

Of course it is somewhat inconsistent for wind power opponents to single out wind power as being a net petroleum consumer, because the same is true of nuclear power, hydropower, coal, and every other form of power generation. They all require petroleum to power the cranes, trucks, shovels, ships, etc. necessary to mine the raw materials and haul and construct the finished equipment.

For any form of electric power generation to pay back its petroleum investment, there must be some mechanism for using the electricity generated to reduce petroleum consumption. In addition to the Pickens Plan, other possible mechanisms include:

A more rigorous definition of "net energy gain" would be to consider whether an energy technology can power its own construction. For example, can we use wind power to build more wind power (or nuclear power to build more nuclear power, etc.), without requiring other forms of energy? At the moment, no one seems to be doing this yet.

Bird kills edit

21:39, 8 October 2008 (UTC): another reference about bird kills, to add to Environmental effects of wind power:

Find the paper that the above article alludes to, with {{Google scholar cite}}:

That finds no results yet. Maybe Google hasn't indexed the paper yet. Google finds many papers by this author in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Here's an online reference: 

Article Information
Minimal effects of wind turbines on the distribution of wintering farmland birds
Claire L. Devereux, Matthew J. H. Denny, Mark J. Whittingham
Journal of Applied Ecology
Volume 9999, Issue 9999 , Pages - 
Journal compilation © 2008 British Ecological Society
Abstract
Received 8 April 2008; accepted 16 August 2008
Handling Editor: Chris Elphick 
DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)
10.1111/j.1365-2664.2008.01560.x About DOI

from which I can piece together the citation with the Universal Reference Formatter:

20:28, 11 August 2011 (UTC): another reference which finds offshore wind farms to have a net benefit for marine life:

Bat kills edit

Several sections of Wikipedia have discussion of bats and wind farms:

If the mechanism of bat death is in fact barotrauma, and the pressure changes are caused by Wingtip vortices from the turbine blades, then adding wingtip devices to the turbine blade tips may reduce the vortices and associated pressure gradients, possibly mitigating barotrauma, reducing blade noise, and increasing turbine efficiency. See:

A Swedish study examined impacts of offshore wind on bats and found some bat species flew 10 km offshore.

A short article on bats foraging in offshore areas and even perching on the turbines, but some of this info could be resulting from the same study above:

A paper about barotrauma in bats:

Wind power tourism edit

05:02, 6 September 2008 (UTC): find more references about wind power tourism. Wind power opponents like to circulate scare stories about wind power decimating tourism. However, some wind farms have actually become tourist attractions, to the surprise of their developers.

Peak oil proponents predict drastic reductions in tourism, since it is the least essential use of petroleum and thus the first that is likely to go away as oil extraction declines. If this turns out to be true, then wind turbines may have little net effect on tourism, because the tourism industry is going to downsize drastically.

Wind turbines on public display edit

07:49, 18 October 2008 (UTC): it would be fun to start building a list somewhere of wind turbines on public display. The closest section I have seen is Unconventional wind turbines#Observation deck, which lists two wind turbines that have observation decks open to the public. Make a list of the wind turbines on public display as I find them, and eventually I might find an article in which to list them: 

Technical data:
Commissioned: May 1997
Hub height: 50m
Rotor diameter: 30m
Rated capacity: 230 kW
Theoretical annual output: 350–400 MWh/a

In mid 1996, a new call for tenders was put out for the location that had been identified on the Danube island near the Steinspornbrücke bridge. Contracts were awarded in August 1996, and construction completed in October 1997.

I see a commons:Category:Steinspornbrücke, but none of the four photos of the bridge show the wind turbine. Here is a newer wind turbine in Vienna:

See also my notes on #Vestas V27 at Great Lakes Science Center above.

07:35, 2 November 2008 (UTC): I created a Category:Wind turbines on public display as a subcategory of Category:Wind power, so I can group these various wind farms that have visitor centers and public tours. I also started a new section:

which might eventually spin off to a separate article if this list becomes large.

10:06, 4 January 2009 (UTC): while searching for free images on Flickr, I came across photos of visitor kiosks at two wind farms owned by FPL Energy. The visitor kiosks use the same design.

04:36, 19 January 2009 (UTC): Here is information about wind power at schools in the U.S.:

That lists a huge number of wind turbines. For example, here's one I didn't know about, a Vestas V47-660kW at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy:

Unfortunately, Flinfo is down yet again just now. I like this photo enough to upload it by hand. That is, just edit the commons:Template:Information myself to be like Flinfo would automatically fill out. I always have to edit the template anyway, since Flinfo doesn't get things right. Actually I don't see how to get all the fields that Flinfo gets for a photo, including the date and time of the photo, and information about the person who uploaded it. I can see a date of the photo, but no time, and when I go to the author's page, it's not clear what I'm seeing. I will wait for Flinfo to come back so I can be sure I'm putting the right information on the photo.

06:48, 8 August 2009 (UTC): the AWEA projects list for Illinois lists a 2.5 MW Clipper wind turbine at a "Sustaiable (sic) Technologies Museum", but I am not able to find any more information about it. That would be one of the biggest wind turbines at a museum I have heard of yet.

  • Name: Sustainable Technologies Museum
  • Power capacity: 2.5 MW
  • Units: 1
  • Turbine mfr.: Clipper
  • Developer: FPC/GSG wind
  • Owner: GSG 3, LLC
  • Power purchaser: ComEd
  • Year online: 2007

{{Google}} for it:

"Sustainable Technologies Museum" may be a garbling of the Sustainable Discover Center in Sublette, Illinois. More references:

However, the Sustainable Discovery Center does not list a Clipper 2.5 MW wind turbine in its arsenal:

20:48, 18 April 2010 (UTC): the Sénart Square shopping center in France has this wind turbine: File:Eolienne du Carré Sénart.jpg. Google is not being helpful for finding information about this wind turbine.

Search in French:

Wind turbine webcams edit

09:26, 5 December 2008 (UTC): some wind turbines have webcams mounted on their nacelles. The images are accessible over the Internet, and change as the nacelle rotates on the tower to keep the rotor facing the wind. For example:

Images of wind turbines edit

20:31, 4 November 2008 (UTC): Commons has many images of wind turbines, but sometimes it is difficult to start with an article and find am image to illustrate it. Sometimes a more fruitful strategy is to browse through the photos, and then look for articles to put some of the photos in. That is, it's easier to find an article to go with a photo than to find a photo to go with an article. That has to do with the better organization and searchability of articles. See User:Teratornis/Notes#Image search.

  • On Wikipedia:
    • //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=windmill&ns6=1&fulltext=Search
    • //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=wind+farm&ns6=1&fulltext=Search
    • //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=wind+power&ns6=1&fulltext=Search
    • //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=wind+turbine&ns6=1&fulltext=Search
  • On Commons:

I could make a gallery of images for wind turbines on public display.

I made a single-signon account with Special:MergeAccount so I can edit on Commons. See WP:EIW#SingleSignon and commons:User:Teratornis.

00:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC): I have been looking through the many wind power photos on Commons recently, categorizing them by country (where they aren't already, and I can determine the country). I'm also categorizing some of the photos by wind turbine vendor, when I can recognize the vendor. There are some nice photos which can go in our wind-power-related articles. I find it is generally easier to browse through collections of photos, and then find articles to put them in, rather than start with some arbitrary article and try to find photos for it. The current technology for searching text is much better than for searching photos, so once you have recognized a promising photo by viewing it, you can easily look up articles on Wikipedia to put it in. I have found some photos to add to various places:

In addition to Commons, some of the other language Wikipedias have wind power photos that are not on Commons yet, such as from the Italian Wikipedia:

and from the Danish Wikipedia:

Flickr has some interesting photos too. For example, Flickr has a clearer version of an existing photo on Commons:

07:51, 26 November 2008 (UTC): while browsing through commons:Category:Wind farms I saw this image:

which links to this user page on the Dutch Wikipedia:

which is a bit tough for me to read because I don't speak Dutch. See what {{Google translation}} can do:

The translation is almost readable. I looked at the site of Victor Bos and it doesn't seem he focuses on wind power. He had one or two photos that the Dutch Wikipedia uses. The Dutch Wikipedia does, however, have some information about wind power in the Netherlands which I might use in a Wind power in The Netherlands article. See:

09:10, 15 January 2009 (UTC): look for images of the two Enercon E-30 wind turbines in Antarctica that Wind turbine#Record-holding turbines mentions:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine antarctica under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: mawson station under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

No luck there. This page from the Australian Antarctic Division Web site has a nice picture showing the Mawson Wind Farm, but I don't know the copyright status of Australian Government works. I'll assume they aren't as nice as the U.S. Government. Almost nobody is. Google Image search has lots of photos of these wind turbines, but Google does not provide any way I know of to search for free images, and most of what you find on the Web is not free:

10:03, 22 January 2009 (UTC): here is an image like one I would like to make a free version of it in a larger pixel size (actually it would be better as an SVG file and thus scaleable to any size with no loss of resolution):

The image is a diagram showing the scale of a series of wind turbines. It would be cool to make a similar image showing a series of old, modern, and future proposed wind turbines. 21:55, 22 January 2009 (UTC): later I found this source which says the image is from NREL:

Murdochville edit

03:56, 14 November 2008 (UTC): expand the wind farm description in Murdochville. References:

Images:

This is an interesting image; too bad it's under copyright:

Wind power in Italy edit

10:22, 20 November 2008 (UTC): as of that date, Italy was the largest producer of wind power (7th in the world in 2007) still without a "Wind power in..." article on Wikipedia. Therefore, I started a Wind power in Italy article. I have not started many articles yet on Wikipedia, preferring to improve the existing articles, but this is a bothersome gap. I don't speak Italian, but many words are cognates with English, and in a technical area such as wind power where I am familiar with the topic, I can get by with machine translation.

Wind power in Italy references edit

Some references:

Lista di centrali elettriche presenti in Italia.

Società Centrale Tipologia Potenza MW Indirizzo Città Prov.
Company Central Type MW Power Address Cities Prov.
Endesa Italia S.p.a. Centrale dei Poggi Alti Eolico 20 loc. Poggi Alti Scansano GR
I.V.P.C. S.r.l. Centrale IVPC Eolica 7 Zona Industriale Loc. Maggiano - Vallata Anzano di Puglia FG
I.V.P.C. S.r.l. Centrale IVPC Eolica 17 Zona Industriale Loc. Maggiano - Vallata Monteleone di Puglia FG
I.V.P.C. S.r.l. Centrale IVPC Eolica 20 Zona Industriale Loc. Maggiano - Vallata Sant'Agata di Puglia FG
Sorgenia S.p.a. Fossato di Vico Eolica 0.750 Fossato di Vico PG
Gamesa Energia Italia S.p.a. Parco Eolico Durazzano Eolica 14 Monte Longano Durazzano BN

Images of wind power in Italy edit

Images of wind power in Italy on the Italian Wikipedia edit

Look for images of wind turbines, wind farms, etc. on the Italian Wikipedia. Images that are not already on Commons appear in bold:

  • it:Immagine:Market share eolico.JPG - a graph with a caption in Italian:
    • Market share dei produttori di energia elettrica da fonte eolica (Italia, 2006)
    • Google translated to English: Market share of producing electricity from wind power source (Italy, 2006)
  • it:Immagine:Parco eolico dei Poggi Alti Scansano (GR).jpg
    • This file and its description page (Amendment debate) are on Wikimedia Commons. If you are unfamiliar Commons, visit the Welcome page, or read the FAQ.
  • it:Immagine:Poggi Alti 10(3).jpg
  • it:Immagine:Passo Monte Croce Carnico 1.jpg - someone already appears to have templated this image to move to Commons. Or maybe that was automatic. I translated the text:
    • A file with this license can be made available in other languages in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects if loaded on Wikimedia Commons. Any user can make the transfer. List of transferable images. You can get help from CommonsHelper. Once transferred the file, enter on this page: ((NowCommons | on behalf of the Commons))
    • The image looks really good, showing a wind turbine in the Plöcken Pass, I guess. Move it to Commons.
    • it:Passo di Monte Croce Carnico has the caption for this photo (Google translated to English): Wind power plant on the Austrian side of the pitch Monte Cross Carnico

This is a productive search, it finds several articles that mention wind farms in Italy, a few having photos I did not previously find:

Figure out how to transfer images to Commons from the Italian Wikipedia.

Images of wind power in Italy on Commons edit

08:55, 21 November 2008 (UTC): several useful images are on the Italian Wikipedia that I would like to use in Wind power in Italy. To use them, I need to move them to Commons. See: Wikipedia:Moving images to Commons. Make a list here of all the images I would like to re-use. When I figure out how to move the images, add them to a suitable category on Commons, for example:

Look for more images on Commons, search for "eolica", the Italian word for "wind". This finds only one image of wind turbine(s) in Italy that was not already in commons:Category:Wind power in Italy, so I added it to the correct category.

That seems to be about all I can find on Commons. Except for these which I first found on the Italian Wikipedia:

Images of wind power in Italy on Flickr edit

Look for images on Flickr:

10:41, 2 January 2009 (UTC): but now I have my wonder weapon, the {{Flickr free}} search template:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind power italy under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind turbine italy under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: wind farm italy under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: eolica under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa - finds some photos of Spanish (more) and Italian (fewer) wind farms

The above searches find a few photos, for example:

Images of wind power in Italy on the English Wikipedia edit

07:25, 22 November 2008 (UTC): somewhat belatedly, I thought to try searching for images of wind power in Italy on the English Wikipedia. If I find any, then naturally I would like to move them to Commons if they are under a suitably free license. That would be a good way for me to practice the procedure, using a source wiki whose language I understand. Then I might be able to move images from the Italian Wikipedia to Commons even though I don't speak Italian.

Use my search methods from User:Teratornis/Notes#Image search. That finds a mix of images, some on Commons, and some only on the English Wikipedia. I did not find any new images of modern wind turbines in Italy that I have not already seen. But I did stumble across commons:Category:Windmills in Italy with a couple of photos of antique windmills.

References edit

17:29, 9 June 2008 (UTC): search for some references with the {{Google scholar cite}} template that I recently created:

21:55, 8 July 2008 (UTC): other interesting references:

07:51, 8 May 2009 (UTC): some interesting videos:

Hendrik is the chief technology officer for Siemens Wind Power, and he answers questions about wind power at Windpower 2009. Topics: why wind turbines have three blades, direct-drive vs. gearboxes, maximum water depth for offshore wind, maximum wind turbine size, horizontal axis vs. vertical axis, troubleshooting in wind farms, and why the oil industry cannot build offshore equipment cheaply enough for the wind industry.

Wind power in Austria edit

20:20, 23 November 2008 (UTC): I also created a new article: Wind power in Austria. It was pretty easy since I followed the general pattern from Wind power in Italy. I could start the remaining missing "Wind power in ..." articles.

Wind power in Germany edit

Windpark Klettwitz edit

20:10, 13 May 2009 (UTC): Windpark Klettwitz may be (or have been) the largest wind farm in Europe. It does not appear on List of onshore wind farms.

The windpark is apparently adjacent to EuroSpeedway Lausitz. I noticed wind turbines in the background of this photo from The Guardian article about the Shell Eco-marathon 2009 at EuroSpeedway Lausitz:

so I Googled around and found they must be part of Windpark Klettwitz.

The Wind power database entry sounds incorrect, as the Vestas V80 has a nameplate capacity of 1.8 MW. 29*1.8 = 52.2 MW.

Gütsch windfarm, Switzerland: formerly the world's highest edit

While I was reading some sources about wind power in Austria, I read about the highest large-scale wind turbine in the world, at Gütsch windfarm, Switzerland near Andermatt. It's an Enercon E40/600 at an elevation of 2,330 m.

See #Wind power in Argentina on this page for the current high-altitude record-holding wind turbine as of 23:48, 16 April 2010 (UTC).

Wind power in Argentina edit

Barrick Gold Corporation's Veladero wind turbine edit

21:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC): the record for highest-elevation single large-scale wind turbine goes to this one by Barrick Gold Corporation in San Juan Province (Argentina):

I added a note about that to both of those topics.

20:34, 16 April 2010 (UTC): a Spanish Wikipedia user uploaded a photo and two diagrams almost certainly about this wind turbine at the Barrick Gold Corporation's Veladero mine:

)

Figure out where the Veladero mine is.

One would think a massive open-pit gold mine would be big enough to show up on Google Maps.

  • Pascua-Lama gives coordinates of the mine which is to the northwest of Veladero.

San Jorge Basin edit

05:02, 6 September 2008 (UTC): San Jorge Basin#Energy describes a wind farm in Argentina. At the moment, Wikipedia's coverage of wind power in South America is rather sparse, perhaps because most South Americans are not native English speakers and therefore not many edit on the English Wikipedia, and because the wind power industry in South America is just getting started. Find some references about this wind power development with {{Google}} and {{Google scholar cite}}:

  • "Energy Overview of Argentina". www.geni.org. Retrieved 2008-09-06.
    • Spanish companies Endesa and Elecnor have proposed building and operating three wind farms in Patagonia with a total nameplate capacity of 3,000 MWe, enough to meet 12% of Argentina's energy (electricity?) demands by 2010. Estimated cost: $2.25 billion.

Other language Wikipedias edit

10:47, 28 November 2008 (UTC): the other language Wikipedias have some coverage of wind power not in the English Wikipedia yet. Try to see what they have. Where possible, add interlanguage links to the various "Wind power in ..." articles.

23:13, 29 November 2008 (UTC): I just created {{Translate wikipedia}} to give a more compact syntax for machine-translating these articles to English.

German Wikipedia edit

Google translates "Wind power in Germany" as "Windenergie in Deutschland". The Wind power in Germany article does not yet have an interlanguage link to the German Wikipedia. See if the German Wikipedia has an article with that title:

  • de:Windenergie in Deutschland - it does not. However, some of the other wind power articles in the German Wikipedia look interesting. In particular, they show additional detail about several wind power-related images I saw on Commons that have incomplete descriptions there, such as this one which the de: says is in Luxembourg:

Articles about wind power in the German Wikipedia:


Spanish Wikipedia edit

The Wind power in Spain article has a link to its counterpart in the Spanish Wikipedia:


Danish Wikipedia edit


Italian Wikipedia edit 

- this article has a great photo of a wind turbine in the pass (actually on the Austrian side):


The future of wind power edit

Denmark plans to build very large offshore wind turbines, with nameplate capacity between 8 and 12 MW, 170m hub height, 200m rotor diameter:

08:33, 24 July 2009 (UTC): that link seems to have broken, the page is now here:

EROEI edit

22:30, 8 May 2009 (UTC): several articles on Wikipedia give conflicting information about the EROEI of wind turbines.

Actually the cited paper claims an EROEI of 80 for 600-kW wind turbines in 1996. The smaller 10-30 kW wind turbines of 1980 had an EROEI of 20. (Possibly today's larger 1-5 MW wind turbines have an even better EROEI.) The citation is to a summary page on the Danish Wind Energy Association Web site, which links to a much more detailed paper:

Intermittency/variability and backup requirements edit

19:32, 24 July 2009 (UTC): a feature of wind power is its intermittency (or variability, as different authorities prefer different terms). Several articles relating to wind power mention this issue, but the treatment is not uniform. (Different articles cite different references with different conclusions.) Wind power proponents acknowledge the problem of intermittency but consider it to be a problem manageable at "modest" cost. Wind power critics typically claim the problem is insurmountable, and tend to present this as self-evident.

The National Grid (UK) article cites this paper:

Read the paper and see whether it adds anything useful to Wind power in the United Kingdom#Capacity factor and back-up controversy.

Another reference, which sounds like a report about Desertec:

Wind turbine logistics edit

An interesting article about the difficulties of moving wind turbine components around the world:

  • Franken, Marcus (2008). "Heavy Duty". New Energy. p. 28. Retrieved 2008-12-14. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Wind power in Mexico edit

Mexico lags far behind its neighbor to El Norte, but has some wind power. Wikipedia has no Wind power in Mexico article yet, but does have Electricity sector in Mexico#Wind. Here is a new wind farm at La Ventosa, Oaxaca, which apparently more than doubles Mexico's installed wind power capacity:

Wind power in Africa edit

Various articles that mention wind power edit

04:25, 3 January 2009 (UTC): Wikipedia has several articles that mention wind power in the context of something else. Sometimes these articles do not cover wind power as well as the main wind power articles do. For example:

Look at Special:Whatlinkshere/Wind power and see if the articles that mention wind power have coverage that is up to the quality standard of our main wind power articles.

Wind resources edit

08:13, 24 June 2009 (UTC): here is a popular press article about a journal article that has some updated estimates of wind resources of various countries:

Sloppy reference to the underlying scholarly paper:

Xi Lu, Michael McElroy, and Juha Kiviluoma. Global potential for wind generated electricity. PNAS Early Online Edition for the week of June 22, 2009. doi/10.1073/pnas.0904101106

Find it with {{Google scholar cite}}:

21:47, 27 June 2009 (UTC): Google does not find the paper yet. Here is the abstract page from the PNAS site, and a free PDF of the whole paper:

Manually put it into a {{Cite journal}} template:

The paper looks interesting. It has some maps of wind resource potential which would be nice to duplicate in free content SVG versions, if we can get the underlying data. Incorporate this information in articles that mention wind resource estimates.

Search with {{Google scholar cite}} for papers by the coauthors:

The authors are from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, but I don't see a field for putting that into a {{Citation}} template. There is a location field, but that seems to apply to the conference where the authors presented the paper. The conference was:

Offshore edit

18:23, 23 July 2009 (UTC): here is an interesting paper that describes some construction details from Nysted Wind Farm and Thorntonbank Wind Farm:

Work some facts from this paper into the corresponding articles on Wikipedia.

21:00, 1 April 2010 (UTC): another reference giving specifications for some offshore wind turbines:

Work the specifications into the respective articles on Wikipedia about wind power manufacturers.

Propulsion edit

Here is a paper about a scheme to build Rotor ships:

Kite power edit

22:13, 2 August 2009 (UTC): will this ever amount to anything? See Airborne wind turbine, Unconventional wind turbines#Aerial, Saul Griffith. It's hard to write good articles about airborne wind turbines because everything is experimental and not well publicized.

Griffith flashes a citation of a seminal paper on airborne wind turbines on one of his slides at 1:57 in the video. Find the paper:

  • Miles Loyd, Crosswind Kite Power, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.
  • Crosswind Kite Power

Incidentally, my {{Google scholar cite}} script appears to have broken. Google Scholar comes up, but there is no {{Wikify}} link under each entry. Oh well, I can still get the citation and manually format it: 

Crosswind kite power (for large-scale wind power production)
LOYD, M.L., California, Univ., Livermore
Journal of Energy 1980
0146-0412 vol.4 no.3 (106-111)
doi: 10.2514/3.48021

We should also have an article about Makani Power, if I can find enough references. We mention in it in the articles: Google.org and Saul Griffith.

Publications edit

07:28, 8 August 2009 (UTC): I've seen some publications about wind power during my random Googling for references.

Statistics edit

02:51, 26 August 2009 (UTC): it would be nice to complete the table "Annual Wind Power Generation (TWh) and total electricity consumption(TWh) for 10 largest countries" at the bottom of Wind power#Wind power usage. A possibly helpful reference:

Data current missing from the table:

  • Year 2007:
    • Three of four world totals are missing: electrical energy generated from wind, TWh; capacity factor of world total wind power plant; % of total electrical energy generated; total electrical energy generated.
  • Year 2008:
    • All four totals
    • All four data items for Germany, India, Italy, United Kingdom

Examine the references other editors used to compile previous years in the table:

Compute the average capacity factor for all the world's commercial-scale wind turbines in 2008. Data from the World Wind Energy Report 2008:

  • Annual energy production: 260 TWh
  • Total nameplate capacity installed: 121’188 MW, out of which 27’261 MW were added in 2008

The World Wind Energy Report does not give a capacity factor. We can compute it from the hours per year (24 * 365 = 8760):

  • 121188 MW * 8760 hr/yr = 1,061,606,880 MWh/hr = 1.062 TWh/yr
  • Average capacity factor = 260/1,061 = 0.245

The 2008 report does not contain data for 2007. Look for that:

The WWEA figures look to be running a bit higher than the values for previous years already in the table. I'm not sure why. Possibly the earlier table values attempt to count the actual wind-generated electricity in a given year, while the WWEA figures estimate the annual output of wind projects completed through the end of a year. Given that wind power is growing fast, that would be like moving the WWEA figures several months ahead.

Location maps edit

19:08, 19 September 2009 (UTC): location maps make a useful addition to wind power articles. After I saw the location map in Wind power in Maine, I made a similar map for Wind power in Ohio. A questioner on the Help desk asked about adding one to List of wind farms in South Australia, so I made a sample in Talk:List of wind farms in South Australia#Locator map to inspire other editors, just as I had earlier done in Talk:Cape Wind#Locator map. The following subsections list some issues with these maps.

Pushpin images edit

The location map in Wind power in Maine uses pushpin images that are difficult to distinguish: File:Green pog.svg, File:Purple pog.svg, etc. The colors are washed out and thus not very different from each other, and the shapes are all the same. It would be better to use distinct symbols such as crosses for decommissioned wind farms, etc. See what other pushpin images are available. Look in Commons:Category:Map pointers.

Generating location maps automatically edit

It would be nice to generate location maps automatically, for example by parsing a table such as the one in List of wind farms in South Australia with a Perl script.

Articles that could use location maps edit

Find the other lists of wind farms which could use location maps.

Using other images as background maps edit

In the Cape Wind article, there is already File:Massachusetts wind resource map 50m 800.jpg with an awkward verbal description of the wind farm site. See if I can incorporate that map into a location map. Presumably this just requires setting the boundary coordinates accurately.

Bioenergy and biofuel edit

00:57, 30 March 2008 (UTC): edit some articles and templates about bioenergy and biofuel. I don't see biofuels substituting one for one for petroleum any time soon, but biofuels can replace some petroleum for fuel, and perhaps eventually all of petroleum for feedstock use.

Navigation template edit

I don't see any navigation template for bioenergy; it should go in Category:Energy templates. Such a template could link to representative articles from these categories:

I'm working on this template in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2. 07:13, 4 April 2008 (UTC): I edited the template a little. It's shaping up rather nicely. The Category:Biofuels does not distinguish between biofuels themselves, and technologies for synthesizing, converting, and/or refining biofuels from biomass. I might want to create a biofuels technology subcategory. I'm setting up the template with separate groups for links to biofuels and biofuels technologies, respectively. 07:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC): I copied the template to: {{Bioenergy}}.

Miscanthus giganteus edit

00:52, 18 April 2008 (UTC): the Miscanthus giganteus article needs work. The article about the genus, Miscanthus, contains more information that is specifically about Miscanthus giganteus than the Miscanthus giganteus article contains.

Some references (to-do: summarize each one):


Copy the Miscanthus giganteus article to User:Teratornis/Sandbox so I can bang on it there. Also, edit the Miscanthus article so it uses {{Main}} to refer to Miscanthus giganteus.

Things to fix in Miscanthus giganteus:

  • The {{Taxobox}} template has a red link in the genus_authority field (currently the value is: Keng). 
| genus_authority = Andersson<ref name="grin">
{{cite web
|url=http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/genus.pl?7661
|title=Miscanthus information from NPGS/GRIN
|publisher=www.ars-grin.gov
|accessdate=2008-04-11
|last=
|first=
}}
</ref>
  • Mention that the plant is a sterile hybrid of M. sinensis and M. sacchariflorus, that it doesn't produce seeds, so growers reproduce it with rhizome propagules, it's twice as productive as switchgrass, it is perennial and requires little herbicide as it outcompetes most weeds, and needs little fertilizer.
  • Dry biomass has almost the same heat of combustion as Powder River Basin coal.

07:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC): I can search more efficiently for journal articles using the {{Google scholar}} template I just made. For example:

Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) edit

06:20, 20 May 2008 (UTC): fix the messed-up references in Panicum virgatum (Switchgrass). First, just make a list of the references and put them into citation templates. Then try to match up the references with the statements in the article they supposedly support. Relevant discussions:

Templates I will need for these complicated references: {{Cite web}}, {{Cite book}}, {{Cite conference}}, {{Cite journal}}.

Here is a page of references for switchgrass which I ran across while searching for the references in our switchgrass article:

The following subsections contain edits to support my cleanup of the references in Panicum virgatum:

Un-numbered references edit

Try to find real citation links for the rest of these sources from the Panicum virgatum article. Add a <strike> tag to each reference after I put it into a template here. Then I can easily see which ones still need templates.

  • Switchgrass Production in Ontario: A Management Guide. Samson, R., 2007. Resourse Efficient Agriculture Production (REAP) - Canada
  • Table 28. Guidelines for rotational stocking of selected forage crops. International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) Forage Crop Pocket Guide Developed by Ball, Hoveland, Lacefield Edited by Armstrong, Darst 2006
    • I found this reference online with a {{Google custom}} search of the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) site:
    • Ball, D.M. (2006). Forage Crop Pocket Guide. International Plant Nutrition Institute. pp. Table 28. Guidelines for rotational stocking of selected forage crops. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Table 33b. Total Digestible Nutrients (TDN) and Relative Feed Value (RFV) Ranges for Various Forge Crops. International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) Forage Crop Pocket Guide Developed by Ball, Hoveland, Lacefield Edited by Armstrong, Darst 2006
  • Planting and Managing Switchgrass for Forage, Wildlife, and Conservation. Wolf, DD, Fiske, DA. Virginia Cooperative Extension Publication # 418-013, June, 1996.

Manually-numbered references edit

20:51, 24 May 2008 (UTC): several of these are redundant with the un-numbered references above. I only add citation templates here for the references which are distinct.

1. General Planting Guide for Warm Season Grasses in the Northeast U.S. & Canada. Ernst Seed Catalog Web Page http://www.ernstseed.com/switchgrass_planting_quide.htm Ernst Conservation Seeds, LLP, 9006 Mercer Pike, Meadville, PA 16335 Copyright 2007, Ernst Conservation Seeds, LLP. All rights reserved.

2. Lecture notes prepared by Tanya Silzer for lecture titled: “Panicaum virgatum L. - Switchgrass, prairie switchgrass, tall panic grass” www.usask.ca/agriculture/plantsci/classes/rang/panicum/html

3. Southern Forages. Third Edition. DM Ball, CS Hoveland, GD Lacefield. Copyright 2002 by the Potash & Phosphate Institute and the Foundation for Agronoomic Research. ISBN 0-9629598-3-9 p 26

4. USDA NRCS Plant Fact Sheet. Switchgrass - Panicum virgatum L. Plant symbol = PAVI2. 16Jan2001 JKL; 28sp05 jsp; 24may06sjp

6. Farmers' motivations for adoption of switchgrass. Hipple PC, Duffy MD. Trands in New Crops and New Uses, ed. J. Janich and A. Whipkey, pp. 252-266, ASHA Press, Alexandria VA, 2002.

7. The Biofuels Explosion: Is Green Engergy Good for Wildlife? Laura Bies, The Wildlife Society Bulletin 34(4): 1203-1205; 2006

8. Native Plants Journal. Fall, 2000. Vol. 1(2) http://nativeplants.for.uidaho.edu/ ISSN 1522-8339.

9. Switchgrass Production in Ontario: A Management Guide. Samson, R., 2007. Resourse Efficient Agriculture Production (REAP) - Canada

10. The isolation and identification of steroidal sapogenins in switchgrass. Lee ST, Vogel KP, et.al. Jnl of Natural Toxins, Vol 10 No. 4 2001 p 273-81.

11. Fall Panicum (Panicum dichotomiflorum) Hepatotoxicosis in Horses and Sheep. Johnson, AL, et.al. J Vet Intern Med 2006;20:1414-1421.

12. Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) Toxicity in Rodents, Sheep, Goats and Horses. Stegelmeier, BL, et.al. USDA-ARS Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory, Logan UT & ILS, Inc, Research Triangle Park, NC. As reprinted in Utah State University Extension Veterinary Newsletter. July, 2005.

13. Table 28. Guidelines for rotational stocking of selected forage crops. International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) Forage Crop Pocket Guide Developed by Ball, Hoveland, Lacefield Edited by Armstrong, Darst 2006

14. Table 33b. Total Digestible Nutrients (TDN) and Relative Feed Value (RFV) Ranges for Various Forge Crops. International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) Forage Crop Pocket Guide Developed by Ball, Hoveland, Lacefield Edited by Armstrong, Darst 2006

15. Planting and Managing Switchgrass for Forage, Wildlife, and Conservation. 

  Wolf, DD, Fiske, DA. Virginia Cooperative Extension Publication # 418-013,

June, 1996.

16. Native Warm-Season Perennial Grasses for Forage in Kentucky. Rasnake, M., Lacefield, G. University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service. AGR-145, 2004

17. Establishing and Managing Switchgrass. Renz, M., Undersander, D. University of Wisconsin Extension, 3/15/07

18. Switchgrass. Salvo, SK, Brock, BG. Division of Forest Resources, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

19. Plentiful switchgrass emerges as breakthrough biofuel. Bob Secter. Chicago Tribune. SignOnSanDiego.com The San Diego Union Tribune. 12/21/06.

20. Switchgrass Profile. David Bransby, Auburn University. http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/switchgrass-profile.html

Images edit

04:28, 22 May 2008 (UTC): while googling around to resolve the references for the Panicum virgatum article, I noticed this handy template:

with which I can mark images such as this one from the Natural Resources Conservation Service:

Chris Somerville: Development of Cellulosic Biofuels edit

This is a long lecture about biofuels by Chris Somerville (Director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, University of California).

As is common among many in the biofuels community, Somerville seems to be working from the orthodox science assumption that global warming is the main problem, and the Energy Information Administration's optimistic projections of steady expansion in global oil extraction are true. I.e., Somerville seems not to have heard of peak oil yet, not that it really matters to his work. He's trying to develop biofuels either way. If peak oil really did occur in 2005 or 2006, as seems increasingly likely, that will merely add urgency and value to his work, rather than change its essential character.

Wikipedia seems to have no article about Chris Somerville yet, although it has an article about one of his business partners, George Church, as well as the Energy Biosciences Institute which Somerville directs. (I added {{Bioenergy}} to the EBI article.) I could think about starting an article about Dr. Somerville.

At 18:32 in his video, Somerville mentions that he is on the National Research Council's Committee on America's Energy Future. At 19:13 he says he is on the Transportation Fuels Subcomittee which is looking at biofuels and coal. Wikipedia does not seem to mention that comittee; googling for: "Committee on America's Energy Future" finds a few other members, for example:

  • Christine Ehlig-Economides, Ph.D. (note the typo in her name in the section heading on that page, hah)
  • Mark Stephen Wrighton who curently serves as Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on America's Energy Future
  • Harold Shapiro, President Emeritus, Princeton University and Chair, National Research Council Committee on America's Energy Future; Wikipedia has an article about Harold Tafler Shapiro who appears to be the same person.

At 22:30 he mentions Miscanthus giganteus, and shows a seven-year-old stand of the plant at an agricultural research field of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He says the stand has never been irrigated nor fertilized, and each year they harvest the biomass, with a yield of up to 26 tons per acre. He says M. giganteus is one of his favorite biomass plants. And no wonder.

At 24 minutes he lists several advantages of perennial energy crops. He mentions Miscanthus is a C4 perennial, so you harvest it in the winter, because the plant recycles its nutrients into its root system in autumn. That's why it is a low-input crop compared to annual crops such as maize, which must grow from seed each year. He mentions that perennial plants outperform annual plants because the root systems survive the winter, and the leaves and stems begin growing in early spring, from well-developed roots, before farmers are even able to plow fields to plant annual crops.

At 48 minutes he summarizes the problems that limit algae fuel. Basically, it costs too much to build the containers, relative to the solar energy the algae can capture (only about 20 watts per square meter).

Overall, I would say this is the most outstanding video lecture about biofuels that I have seen so far, probably because it's one of the few by an actual scientific expert. However, Dr. Somerville whips through some of his slides too rapidly for me to scrutinize, and the YouTube resolution makes the text one some illegible. See if I can locate his source materials in HTML format.

Comparison of ethanol production in Brazil vs. United States edit

05:24, 21 August 2008 (UTC): it would be nice to add some more data to the table in this section:


Comparison of key characteristics between
the ethanol industries in the United States and Brazil
Characteristic   Brazil   U.S. Units/comments
Feedstock Sugar cane Maize Main cash crop for ethanol production, the US has less than 2% from other crops.
Total ethanol production (2007) [1] 5,019.2 6,498.6 Million U.S. liquid gallons
Total arable land [2] 355 270(1) Million hectares.
Total area used for ethanol crop (2006)[2][3] 3.6 (1%) 10 (3.7%) Million hectares (% total arable)
Productivity per hectare [2][4][3][5] 6,800-8,000 3,800-4,000 Liters of ethanol per hectare. Brazil is 727 to 870 gal/acre (2006), US is 321 to 424 gal/acre (2003-05)
Energy balance (input energy productivity) [6][3][7] 8.3 to 10.2 times 1.3 to 1.6 times Ratio of the energy obtained from ethanol/energy expended in its production
Estimated greenhouse gas emission reduction [8][3][9] 86-90%(2) 10-30%(2)  % GHGs avoided by using ethanol instead of gasoline, using existing crop land.
Estimated payback time for greenhouse gas emission[10] 17 years(3) 93 years(3) Brazilian cerrado for sugar cane and US grassland for corn. Land use change scenarios by Fargione et al. [11]
Flexible-fuel vehicle fleet (autos and light trucks)[12][13] 6.0 million 6.8 million As of August 2008 for Brazil (fleet between E25 and E100), and as of April 2008 for the US (fleet is E85).
Ethanol fueling stations in the counrty[4][14] 33,000 (100%) 1,700 (1%) As % of total fueling gas stations in the country. Brazil for 2006, U.S. as July 2008[15] and total of 170,000[14]
Ethanol's share within the gasoline market[16][17][18][19] 50%(4) 4% As % of total consumption on a volumetric basis. Brazil as of April 2008. US as of December 2006.
Cost of production (USD/gallon) [4] 0.83 1.14 2006/2007 for Brazil (22¢/liter), 2004 for U.S. (35¢/liter)
Government subsidy (in USD) [2][14] 0 0.51/gallon U.S. as of 2008-04-30. Brazilian ethanol production is no longer subsidized.
Import tariffs (in USD) [6][4] 0 0.54/gallon As of April 2008, Brazil does not import ethanol, the U.S. does
Notes: (1) Only contiguous U.S., excludes Alaska. (2) Assuming no land use change.[9] (3) Assuming direct land use change.[11] (4) Including diesel-powered vehicles, ethanol represented 18% of the road sector fuel consumption in 2006.[18][20]

Specifically, I would like to add more statistics about both countries to put the respective ethanol industries into further context: population, petroleum production and imports/exports, barrels of oil equivalent of the ethanol produced; total gasoline consumed; diesel fuel consumed; per capita ethanol and gasoline consumption; total vehicle miles driven (if possible); and fleet fuel economy; GDP; per capita GDP; per capita energy consumption from all sources.

It's common for people to cite Brazil's ethanol industry to show what would be possible for the United States, but often the boosters fail to mention that (a) the U.S. already produces more ethanol than Brazil; and (b) Brazil uses far less energy and far less liquid fuel than the U.S., so the problem for ethanol to solve in Brazil is far smaller than in the U.S.

Here is a table I may someday expand with more comparative data:

Comparison of key characteristics between
the ethanol industries in the United States and Brazil
Characteristic   Brazil   U.S. Units/comments
Population (2008) 187,393,918 304,917,000 2008 estimates for both figures.

Algae fuel edit

05:34, 26 February 2009 (UTC): here is an interesting paper which claims that even under the most optimistic assumptions, the cost of biodiesel fuel from algae will be over $800/bbl:

I read the paper and I don't see anything immediately wrong with the reasoning. Chris Somerville of the Energy Biosciences Institute basically agrees - the problem is that photobioreactors cost too much per unit area and convert too little of the incident sunlight into liquid fuels.

References edit

17:39, 17 June 2008 (UTC): search for some references with the {{Google scholar cite}} template that I recently created:

Food vs fuel edit

00:58, 3 October 2008 (UTC): Food vs fuel looks like a somewhat contentious article. Here is a reference:

  • "Biofuels driving global oil supply growth" (PDF). Merrill Lynch. 2008-06-06. Retrieved 2008-10-02.
    • "The expanding global economy continues to face oil supply constraints, prompting consumers to become more efficient in their oil use and substitute into other fuels. Helped by a favourable policy wave, biofuels have rapidly become a major source of incremental fuel supply. On a global scale, biofuels are now the single largest contributor to world oil supply growth. We estimate that retail gasoline prices would be $21/bbl higher, on average, without the incremental biofuel supply."
  • Goodall, Chris (2008-05-29). "Burning food: why oil is the real villain in the food crisis". The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-12-02.
    • Chris Goodell blames high oil prices for high food prices.

Solar energy edit

Solar updraft tower edit

17:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC): this video on YouTube describes a Solar updraft tower pilot plant in Spain:

The most interesting part of the video to me was the observation that beneath the plastic sheeting over the collection area, grasses and shrubs were growing more lushly than in the surrounding scrubby desert. The pilot plant's designers did not anticipate this. Explanation: at night, water vapor condenses on the underside of the plastic sheeting and drips on the ground below it, keeping the greenhouse environment moist. Thus a potential byproduct of these types of solar tower plants could be food or biomass from otherwise non-arable land, without the need for irrigation.

The Solar updraft tower article at the moment does not mention the potential byproduct of converting desert into arable land. This could be a significant benefit of the solar updraft tower concept, given the 2007–2008 world food price crisis along with Food vs fuel concerns. The high value of food or energy crops might offset some of the cost of building a solar updraft tower. In contrast, the existing first-generation biofuels compete with food production on existing (naturally) arable land.

Search with {{Google scholar cite}} for reliable sources about using solar updraft towers to reclaim desert for agriculture:

Some of the search results look interesting. I will have to study them.

Chipmakers edit

03:41, 28 July 2008 (UTC): here's an interesting article about the large number of semiconductor manufacturer who are rushing to manufacture photovoltaics:

Ocean energy edit

Wave power edit

17:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC): I see no navigation template for articles about wave power, other than one line in {{Renewable energy sources}}. Search for existing work with {{Google wikipedia}} and {{Google custom}}:

Fraction of world population living near the ocean edit

18:53, 27 July 2008 (UTC): search with {{Google}} and {{Google scholar cite}} for a citation for the fraction of world population living near the ocean, and add it to the lead section of Ocean energy, which is somewhat weasely on the subject currently.

Wikipedia has a Hypsography article, but it does not mention population. Also, hypsography is about elevation, not necessarily the distance from an ocean (although most lowlands will be near oceans, or they may have ocean-navigable rivers).

Geothermal energy edit

Geothermal heat pump edit

23:54, 27 July 2008 (UTC): fix the broken references in the Geothermal heat pump article.

Microtunneling edit

00:48, 26 October 2008 (UTC): An article in Scientific American about the SuperGrid (liquid hydrogen, superconducting), mentions microtunneling as a possible method for digging tunnels within which to bury the SuperGrid transmission lines. The article reference:

I wonder whether someone has tried using microtunnel boring machines to install the ground loops for geothermal heat pumps? That would avoid the disruption of excavating large amounts of earth. Of course there are already some vertically-drilled and radially-drilled ground loops which require minimal trenching. It would seem microtunneling would expand that option to horizontally-oriented geothermal ground loops.

A reference that {{Google scholar cite}} finds:

Transportation edit

Transportation is the largest user of petroleum, and depends more strongly on petroleum for its energy than other areas of the economy (such as housing, electricity generation, industry). This makes transportation especially susceptible to any temporary or permanent reduction in petroleum supply. The problem with transportation, especially for airplanes and road vehicles, is the need for a portable energy carrier with high energy density both by volume and by weight. All currently known substitutes for liquid fuels from petroleum suffer from a variety of economic and/or physical drawbacks, which is why petroleum powers 95% of transportation worldwide. Therefore, to understand the potential impact of a post-peak oil decline in oil supply, one must understand the alternatives available to power the transportation sector - their costs, pros and cons, potential scale, and time to develop and scale up.

A related idea is to understand the non-transportation substitutes for transportation, e.g. telecommunication, telerobotics, videoconferencing, telepresence, Transportation demand management, etc.

See also #Template:Alternative vehicle propulsion.

Car Sick (book) edit

George Monbiot cites the book Car Sick in his blog at The Guardian:

Car-free movement also cites the book:

Google Books has a 30 or 40 page preview.

How many Tesla Roadsters can one wind turbine power? edit

20:27, 7 August 2010 (UTC): estimate the number of Tesla Roadsters (2008) that one large wind turbine can power. The Roadster has a plug-to-wheel efficiency that depends on driver behavior and road conditions. The Wikipedia article gives several values between 20.5 kW·h/100 mi and 33.6 kW·h/100 mi. Assume 25 kW·h/100 mi and that the average Tesla owner drives 10,000 miles per year. That yields an annual energy consumption of:

 

For the wind turbine, assume a model such as the Vestas V80-1.8 MW which is common in the US for onshore wind farms (e.g., Buffalo Gap Wind Farm). Most wind farms have capacity factors ranging between 20% and 40%. Assume 25% to be conservative. Further assume 10% transmission loss between the wind farm and the Tesla charging stations. Under these assumptions, multiply the wind turbine nameplate capacity times the capacity factor times the number of hours per year times the transmission efficiency to compute the annual energy it can deliver to the Teslas:

 

Dividing this number by the annual energy consumption of the Tesla gives:

 

In reality, wind power is an Intermittent energy source, so a single wind turbine may not be producing power at exactly all the times when the Teslas are recharging. However, the Tesla has a driving range of over 200 miles per full charge, and few people will drive that far every day. (10,000 miles per year is an average of 27 miles per day.) This means the Teslas combined with a smart grid using time-based electricity pricing would allow for some flexibility as to when they would recharge. A driver who doesn't plan to drive far in the next several days could in principle allow the smart charger to wait out a wind lull of several days. In practice, a large power grid supplies electricity from many different sources, so a single electric car would not follow the operating schedule of a single wind turbine. Rather, the availability of wind power at a given time, along with the electricity demand, would factor into the spot price of electricity at that time. Having electric cars plugged into smart charging stations at most hours of the day would allow the grid as a whole to accommodate a larger percentage of supply coming from intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar, since the cars could adjust the amount of electricity they consume in response to the spot price. On a grid with lots of wind power, the spot price would tend to rise when the wind stops, and many of the electric cars would respond by delaying their recharge automatically. In a vehicle-to-grid scheme, some of the cars could even sell energy back to the grid if the spot price became very high and the car owners have spare capacity.

Because electric cars have built-in energy storage, they should be well-matched to consuming the variable output from wind turbines. Thus it is reasonable to think of the number of electric cars that can be fueled per wind turbine.

Policy edit

Since I live in the U.S., my primary interest is in U.S. energy policy, but the energy problem is a global problem, so every nation must work together to avoid hoarding and resource wars in the event of a peak oil doomsday scenario and so on.

Energy Policy Act of 2005 edit

01:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC): The Energy Policy Act of 2005 article has no navigation templates. It could use several. 00:51, 26 October 2008 (UTC): I added {{Energy in the USA}}. Later I might add {{Energy policy}}, after I create that template.

New Manhattan Project for Energy Independence edit

Potential categories: look at similar articles such as Pickens Plan to see what categories they are in.

Sources: search for them, with {{Google}}, {{Google wikipedia}}, {{Google custom}}, and {{Google scholar cite}}.

Apollo Alliance edit

Here is a video of Amanda Woodrum, Energy Officer, Policy Matters Ohio, host of Ohio Apollo Alliance:

Some presentations by Ms. Woodrum:

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security edit

This is a pretty good paper. Get the citation.

Google Scholar finds the paper, when I put quotes around the title, but the Universal reference formatter does not wikify it into a nice citation. So put it into a nice citation template. The Sustainable energy article already cites it with a bare reference.

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air edit

19:29, 1 May 2009 (UTC): this is a new book by David J. C. MacKay:

In a manner similar to Jacobson's review, MacKay sizes up the energy problem, and explains the scale of renewable energy construction that will be necessary to replace fossil fuels. The book is available on the author's Web site and as a PDF file for free download.

Copyright policy: on the plus side, the author has released the book freely:

This is a free book in a second sense: you are free to use all the material in this book, except for the cartoons and the photos with a named photographer, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. (The cartoons and photos are excepted because the authors have generally given me permission only to include their work, not to share it under a Creative Commons license.) You are especially welcome to use my materials for educational purposes. My website includes separate high-quality files for each of the figures in the book.

But on the minus side, his use of a non-commercial license means we cannot upload the book's images to Wikimedia Commons.

My initial impression is that this book does a very good job of explaining the energy problem to the nontechnical reader.

Page 205 in Chapter 27 has this quote, which is as close as I've seen so far in the book to some mention of virtualizing travel:

Yes, lighting efficiency is improved by a switch to light-emitting

diodes for most lighting, and many other gadgets will get more efficient; but thanks to the blessings of economic growth, we’ll have increased the number of gadgets in our lives – for example video-conferencing systems

to help us travel less.

Renewable energy in the United States edit

21:38, 15 October 2009 (UTC): an interesting article from The Guardian:

Interesting stat from the article: 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal.

Energy security and renewable technology edit

14:57, 12 August 2008 (UTC): as with many of Wikipedia's energy-related articles, Energy security and renewable technology needs work:

  • It's a brief overview article, so it mentions several other energy-related topics in passing, but not all of these references use terminology consistent with the other Wikipedia articles about the subjects, and not all of them have links.
  • The article has no navigation templates. Perhaps we need a new navigation template specifically about energy policy type issues.
  • There are several overlapping articles (e.g., Energy security).

Efficiency edit

19:08, 1 August 2008 (UTC): Wikipedia has several articles about energy efficiency that various people may have edited without being aware of what others were doing. For example, this search finds several:

Including:

Zero-energy building edit

19:27, 28 August 2008 (UTC): The Zero-energy building article has some problems:

  • Not all of the references are in a consistent format; edit them to use citation templates.
  • There is no navigation template. {{Sustainability}} is one option, but that template is big and general. A template more focused on energy efficiency, or perhaps just on efficent buildings, would be nice.
  • The order of standard sections does not quite comply with WP:LAYOUT.

Degree days edit

This map is interesting; it would be nice to get this same data as a shapefile, so I could make an SVG file from it:

Super-efficient refrigerators edit

  • http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html describes a conversion kit to turn an ordinary chest freezer into a chest refrigerator, requiring only 0.1 kWh/day. Top-opening refrigerators have the potential to be far more efficient than conventional front-opening refrigerators, because opening the lid of a chest does not allow the cold air inside to spill out as it does from a front-opening refrigerator.
    • "Chest fridge". Archived from the original on 2011-03-12. Retrieved 2011-03-12. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only about 2 minutes per hour. At all other times it is perfectly quiet and consumes no power whatsoever.

The most efficient production refrigerators are by Sun Frost. But it appears that all their models are conventional uprights. Even so, Sun Frost claims its refrigerators use only 15 kWh per month, compared to 110 kWh for an average refrigerator. But the chest refrigerator uses even less, around 3 kWh/month.

Search on Wikipedia to see whether any articles have already described the energy savings possible by replacing all the existing refrigerators with the most efficient possible refrigerators.

I'm not finding much. Some people make kegerators by converting chest freezers, which is similar to making a chest refrigerator in that it involves installing a thermostat which regulates the interior temperature above freezing. There was once an Icy Ball kerosene-fueled refrigerator that opened on the top. It's possible that no modern refrigerator manufacturer makes a top-opening model to attain the maximum possible efficiency.

I also wonder, has anyone tried integrating a refrigerator with a hot-water heater? The temperature of tap water, in summer where I live, anyway, is colder than the typical air temperature. Cooling the refrigerator condenser with incoming tap water would warm it slightly, making it easier for the hot water heater to heat. Another source of cool fluid to heat-sink the refrigerator condenser would be the loop of a geothermal heat pump.

Search the Web with {{Google}} to see if anyone has thought of integrating these technologies:

The second search finds some links on the first page of results.

New York City edit

21:20, 8 April 2009 (UTC): New York City is one of the most energy-efficient cities in the United States. This is true with respect to New York City's consumption of energy overall, energy as electricity, and energy as liquid fuels. See:

To-do: calculate what the overall U.S. consumption of electricity and petroleum would be if the entire U.S. was as efficient as New York City. In particular, see whether New York City's efficiency, if scaled to the whole U.S., would suffice to eliminate U.S. oil imports. This comparison is interesting because New York City is an American city which undeniably exists and is a leader in commerce, culture and the arts, science and technology, etc. This makes NYC a more relevant example than cities in other countries, or hypothetical ideas about efficient living arrangements that haven't been validated on a large scale.

Steady-state economy edit

20:06, 18 April 2009 (UTC): this is an interesting paper:

  • Daly, Herman E. (2008-04-24). "A Steady-State Economy" (PDF). School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742 USA: Sustainable Development Commission, UK. A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same thing; they are the very different alternatives we face.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

George Monbiot cites it in his blog at The Guardian:

The Sustainable development article mentions the steady-state economy, but the presentation seems to differ from that in the paper.

Daly points out the difference between information and other types of products, but he does not mention the physical reasoning, namely that the Conservation laws apply to material and energy, but do not apply to information in exactly the same way, because humans are still many orders of magnitude away from manipulating information with the theoretical minimum amount of energy. He says intellectual property laws slow the exchange of knowledge thereby helping to keep poor people poor.

Daly makes explicity some ideas I have thought about imprecisely, for example he says:

  • Advertising should be taxed rather than made a tax-deductible business expense. It is inconsistent for economists to regard consumer preference as paramount while at the same time corporations are encouraged to use every possible means to shape consumer preference.
  • Production of less-than-maximally-durable products should be regarded as a maintenance cost, rather than as contributing to economic output. For example, twice as many of a product that lasts 10 years must be built each year to maintain the existing stock compared to a product that lasts 20 years. Doubling the service life of a product divides its maintenance cost in half, if we view the manufacture of replacements as a maintenance cost.

Electricity generation, transmission, storage edit

22:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC): the intermittency of renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar energy creates the need for technologies and policies to better match the variable supply of power to the variable demand. This requires some adjustment for the electric power industry accustomed to fossil fuel power plants that turn on when you need them. The various articles about wind and solar power have some overlapping ad hoc discussions of dealing with intermittency. It would be more efficient to place most of the discussion of mitigation strategies for intermittency in articles specific to each technology, and then link to them from the articles about the intermittent power sources themselves. The first step is to inventory the various articles about mitigation, to see what we have.

SuperGrid edit

22:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC): the SuperGrid article is a bit stubby at present. To-do:

Ludington Pumped Storage Power Plant edit

22:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC): I made a few edits. Add an {{Infobox power station}}.

Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant edit

22:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC): I added {{Electricity generation}}, and I put the standard sections into the standard order per WP:LAYOUT.

Isentropic edit

20:47, 27 April 2010 (UTC): a thermal pumped energy storage technology for which the inventors claim a lower cost than pumped-storage hydroelectricity:

Related links:

I don't see any mentions of this energy storage technology on Wikipedia yet.

Lists of power stations edit

00:10, 8 May 2010 (UTC): Wikipedia has lists of power stations that follow various styles of naming, layout, and topical organization. There are lists for some US states, e.g.:

and countries, e.g.:

and lists for generating stations by type, e.g.:

and by type and country or region:

I'm focusing on lists of power stations for the US states just now. There is a {{PowerStationsUnitedStates}} template which doesn't seem to link to all of the existing lists yet. There is also a Category:Power stations in the United States.

Clearly, List of generating stations in Indiana does not follow the naming convention of all the other existing per-state lists, and the template and category, so I will move it to List of power stations in Indiana. I will also move the templates:

to:

Search for more:

I would like to make these state lists:

See what information sources the other lists use.

  • SourceWatch - has listings for some coal-fired power plants

Energy transportation edit

06:35, 25 May 2010 (UTC): it would be interesting to develop an article (or expand the section: Energy development#Energy transportation) to compare all the major existing or proposed methods of transporting energy, in terms of investment cost, bandwidth, and energy cost to transport a unit of energy. For example, how does transporting coal by railroad compare to transmitting electricity in a power grid? Some forms of energy transportation to compare:

  • Alternating current transmission
  • High-voltage direct current transmission
  • Microwave transmission
  • Laser transmission
  • Oil pipeline (and gas pipeline, coal slurry pipeline, ethanol pipeline)
  • Oil tanker/barge
  • Rail transport
  • Truck transport
  • Embedded energy of finished goods (e.g. locating aluminum smelters near hydroelectric plants, and shipping bauxite to and aluminum from them)

Energy cost edit

21:42, 24 July 2010 (UTC): the cost of energy from various sources comes up repeatedly in any discussion of energy policy. Since energy is rarely a final product in itself, but is instead merely a means to obtain other desirable goods and services (such as heating, cooling, transport, food, etc.), everybody seems to want the cheapest energy. Debates about energy alternatives typically involve debates about what the various alternatives "really" cost. Consider making a navigation template for articles relating to energy costs.

Hydro edit

08:06, 29 October 2008 (UTC): hydropower is a very mature technology. The first commercial power plants in the 1800s were hydroelectric plants. The U.S. has already tapped most of its hydroelectric capacity. However, there are many smaller dams for navigation and flood control that could have small power plants, but currently do not. Make a list of some in my area.

Hydro plants are perhaps the most desirable power plants to have on a grid, especially in conjunction with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar, because hydro plants can act as virtual grid energy storage units, and are rapidly dispatchable in response to varying demand for power on the grid. See:

Untapped hydroelectric potential of the Ohio River edit

09:02, 2 November 2008 (UTC): find some links:

Captain Anthony Meldahl Locks and Dam edit

08:06, 29 October 2008 (UTC): Wikipedia needs an article on the Captain Anthony Meldahl Locks and Dam. It would be a red link in the List of crossings of the Ohio River and List of locks and dams of the Ohio River, except that it's a black link. More than half of the Ohio River dams don't have articles yet, it seems. Here are some links with information about the Meldahl dam and its proposed hydroelectric plant:

Search for photos with {{Flickr free}}:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Meldahl Dam under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa
  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Bracken County Kentucky dam under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Both searches come up dry. This search finds lots of photos, but I will have search through them manually to look for photos of the dam:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: Ohio River Kentucky under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

This search finds two photos of the Cannelton Locks and Dam:

  • Search Flickr for images with the keywords: "Ohio River" dam under these licenses: cc-by or cc-by-sa

Markland Locks and Dam edit

Evidently Markland Locks and Dam (the next dam 95.3 miles downstream on the Ohio River) has a power plant now, 81,000 kva according to this page:

This page:

says:

  • Capacity: 65 megawatts
  • Switzerland County, Indiana
  • Commercial Date: 1967
  • At first this excerpt from the above page made no sense: "has three turbine generators inside a 150-foot high concrete dam", since the head is only 35 feet. At first I did not see where they could fit a structure of 150 vertical feet on the site. Later I found the book by R. F. Ott (see below) that shows a cross-sectional diagram of the powerhouse, which extends well below the pool level of the tailrace, down into the riverbed. The Ohio River is deep everywhere now, because dams along its whole length impound navigation pools.

The first page says Cinergy operates the plant, but Duke Energy merged with Cinergy on April 3, 2006, and the name of the combined entity is Duke Energy now. List of locks and dams of the Ohio River says several dams have hydro plants under construction, but does not list Meldahl as one of them. It looks like the Ohio River has 21 dams, of which only five currently generate electricity. Assuming each dam has a hydro potential between 50 MW and 100 MW (depending on the head, and on how far downstream the dam is), that's an unused hydro potential perhaps in the 1 GW range, the size of a nuclear power plant. Plus, hydroelectric power is the most desirable type of power from a grid energy storage standpoint, because hydroelectric plants can rapidly adjust their output to act as load following power plants, and their reservoirs can absorb the output of intermittent power sources such as wind farms and solar power plants.

Search for some more links with {{Google}} and {{Google scholar cite}}:

That finds some interesting links:

  • "Theatened and Endangered Species Assessment, Public Report, Markland Hydroelectric Project" (PDF). Duke Energy, Indiana. 2007. Retrieved 2008-10-30. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
    • The report lists the powerhouse capacity as 81 MW. This conflicts with the 65 MW figure on the Duke Energy page. So, I have three sources which list the capacity as 81,000 kva, 65 MW, and 81 MW. Duh.
    • This shows aerial views of the powerhouse, which is on the north end of Markland Dam on the Indiana side. The locks are on the south end, the Kentucky side. The report also shows photos of the power lines leading northwest from the dam to the Fairview substation in Indiana.

Google found a book listed on Google Books that shows a cross-sectional diagram of the powerhouse and a turbine.

Energy templates edit

21:43, 30 July 2008 (UTC): I wrote notes about Energy templates (i.e., energy-related navigation templates) elsewhere on this page. Move all my template-related notes to this section so I can keep track of them more easily.

User:Teratornis/Energy/Energy templates visual edit

21:03, 5 August 2010 (UTC): make a page that displays all the energy-related templates:

Eventually consider moving it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy/Energy templates visual, if it looks useful enough.

Template categories edit

08:21, 30 March 2008 (UTC): I noticed some less than optimal categorization in the templates that appear in energy articles. Presumably the most generally appropriate category would be:

but some templates are in:

I will recategorize the clearly energy-related templates into Category:Energy templates, when I notice them as I browse around energy articles.

I noticed that Category:Energy templates is itself in no category. I looked around for a suitable parent category, and I decided Category:Technology and applied science templates probably makes the most sense.

Templates by other users edit

As other users create energy-related navigation templates, make sure the template names are correct, and categorize them appropriately.

Template:Petroleum Industry edit

05:47, 31 July 2008 (UTC): the template is new, and needs the following:

Template:Solar energy edit

17:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC): I see no navigation template for articles about solar energy, other than one line in {{Renewable energy sources}}. Search for existing work with {{Google wikipedia}} and {{Google custom}}:

Categories:

16:35, 30 July 2008 (UTC): I see that someone made a navigation template for solar energy, but they put it in the wrong place:

The template should not be a subpage of another template. See if any other templates (pages in the Template: namespace) have this mistake:

15:53, 1 August 2008 (UTC): It appears that only Template:Navbox/Solar energy is in the wrong place.

21:53, 2 August 2008 (UTC): so move the template to {{Solar energy}} and add a documentation subpage. Fix the links to it: Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Navbox/Solar energy. 06:06, 4 August 2008 (UTC): done.

Template:Sustainable technology edit

00:59, 6 August 2008 (UTC): {{Sustainable technology}} has some energy-related links. I could categorize it into Category:Energy templates and give it a documentation subpage per WP:DOC.

Template:Energy in the USA edit

21:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC): {{Energy in the USA}} can use a documentation subpage per WP:DOC. I think the template could have some more entries. I might split the energy sources group into subgroups for fossils, renewable, and wind (since we have several individual state wind power articles). Also, a group for books could be nice.

22:19, 25 October 2008 (UTC): an unregistered user deleted the energy books group with no prior discussion to build consensus. I might start a discussion about that on Template talk:Energy in the USA.

Other articles to add to the template:

Separate the types of energy into different groups, for example non-renewable and renewable energy, like I did in {{Electricity generation}}. I might make separate groups for individual sources such as wind power and petroleum, which have numerous subsidiary articles.

Template:GalvanicCells edit

23:59, 29 November 2008 (UTC): the {{GalvanicCells}} template had no documentation subpage, and was not listed in {{Energy templates}}. I fixed both items.

Template:Grid modernization edit

23:59, 29 November 2008 (UTC): the {{Grid modernization}} template is not listed in {{Energy templates}}.

Template:Energy templates edit

05:28, 2 August 2008 (UTC): make an {{Energy templates}} template, similar to {{Google templates}}. The latter goes in the "See also" sections of documentation subpages for templates such as {{Google custom}}. That way, when I add or discover more energy-related templates, I can add links to them from all the other energy-related templates by editing only one template.

Template:Ocean energy edit

17:42, 27 July 2008 (UTC): make a template about {{Ocean energy}}. Start it in User:Teratornis/Sandbox. Copy from {{Bioenergy}} and edit it.

Search for existing work with {{Google wikipedia}} and {{Google custom}}:

Categories:

04:48, 25 October 2008 (UTC): {{Ocean energy}} remains somewhat sparse, reflecting the relative lack of development of ocean energy compared with other types of renewable energy. The wind, solar, and geothermal industries are much farther along as of 2008. However, several companies and countries are seriously developing ocean energy, so the industry may grow in size, and Wikipedia articles may grow along with it. However, ocean energy will have a challenge to catch up to wind power, which seems solidly into an exponential growth curve now.

Template:Geothermal power edit

23:54, 27 July 2008 (UTC): make a navigation template for Geothermal power.

Search for existing work with {{Google wikipedia}} and {{Google custom}}:

Somewhat confusingly, the main article for this topic is Geothermal power, but the relevant category is Category:Geothermal energy. I will call the template {{Geothermal power}}, in favor of the main article.

00:56, 6 August 2008 (UTC): I started a draft of the template in User:Teratornis/Sandbox.

Some categories containing articles to add to a {{Geothermal power}} template:

Template:Energy books and films edit

01:58, 10 August 2008 (UTC): do we have a template for energy books and films yet? I am not finding one with these searches:

List some categories containing articles for this template to link to:

Look for other categories containing links to energy-related books and films. There might not be any or many such categories yet.

A page that lists a lot of books relating to energy, although many of them may not yet have articles on Wikipedia:

List of books about energy issues edit

Lists (see: WP:LIST):

Look for similar lists:

Wikipedia has many Lists of books. They appear to follow various formats. One illustrative page is:

I would like to add authors to the entries on List of books about energy issues. I think I like the sortable table format on this page:

Here is an interesting book from Category:Books about petroleum politics, by Chris Mooney: The Republican War on Science. However, I'm not seeing anything about energy jumping right out in the following video (other than some mentions of climate change):

More searches to look for books about energy:

06:48, 16 August 2008 (UTC): temporarily paste in the list entries from List of books about energy issues just in case I missed anything when I converted them to a table.

Template:Energy books edit

04:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC): since there are a lot of books relating to energy, make separate navigation templates for energy-related books and films. Start by making a template for {{Energy books}}. Start it in User:Teratornis/Sandbox. Copy from {{Peak oil}} and edit it.

Template:Energy films edit

04:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC): also make a {{Energy films}}. Start it in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2.

Categories to check for possible links:

Template:Electricity generation edit

03:11, 25 August 2008 (UTC): articles such as Intermittent power source, Baseload power, and Capacity factor have no navigation templates yet. Make a navigation template for these types of articles, {{Electricity generation}}. Start it in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2. Lots of articles about Wind power and other Renewable energy sources link to these articles. To understand the scope for renewables, and the arguments pro and con, one must understand the underlying power technology they rely on or impact.

I thought initially about calling this: Template:Power station technology, but then I liked the name {{Electricity generation}}.

Categories:

Neither the Electricity nor the Electricity generation articles have navigation templates. Electricity generation has some bunched-up edit links which I will fix with the {{FixBunching}} template, if applicable.

Template:Energy policy edit

04:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC): given that the United States presidential election, 2008 is in the home stretch, I'm thinking about Energy policy. I noticed that article has no navigation template. So make an {{Energy policy}} template.

Searches:

Articles:

Categories:

Template:Energy units edit

04:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC): I'm looking at other articles on List of energy topics and seeing some that have no navigation templates yet:

I like the Cubic mile of oil unit. Add energy unit comparison tables to articles such as Barrel of oil equivalent. Consider making a bar graph with gnuplot showing the common energy units against a logarithmic scale. That would compare units of widely varying sizes on a single graph. See also Category:Orders of magnitude and Orders of magnitude (energy).

Template:Petroleum in the United States edit

07:23, 20 November 2008 (UTC): several articles about petroleum in the United States have no navigation template yet. For example:

Template:Alternative vehicle propulsion edit

07:23, 20 November 2008 (UTC): several articles about alternative vehicle propulsion technology have no navigation template yet. For example:

07:33, 16 June 2008 (UTC): make a navigation template for links of the type in: Transportation demand management#See also.

Template:Wind power in the United States edit

03:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC): after I started the Wind power in Italy article, I was looking at its Special:Whatlinkshere/Wind power in Italy and I noticed Wind power in Serbia linking to it. When I looked at that article, I saw a "Wind power in Europe" template that was really just a call to {{Europe topic}}, a template that allows for quick construction of a navigation template that links to every article in a series that has a name matching a simple pattern. The {{United States topic}} template is analogous. I could make a Template:Wind power in the United States that would have links to all the per-state articles such as Wind power in Texas. Right now it would mostly consist of red links, but someday we might have enough wind power articles for the states to justify a navigation template for all of them.

Glossary edit

22:14, 21 June 2009 (UTC): make a Glossary of energy page. See:

I can collect definitions of technical terms from various Wikipedia articles, for example nameplate capacity, capacity factor, Scram, etc. That would be very handy.

Start with User:Teratornis/Glossary of energy. I will follow the simple style in Glossary of chess. I might later experiment with the fancier structured style that Wikipedia:Manual of Style (glossaries) describes in a rather turgid style with too much passive voice with missing actor.

Index edit

22:14, 21 June 2009 (UTC): make an index of energy that follows the analytical style of the Editor's index to Wikipedia. This would require consensus to write an index which does not follow the crude style of article index pages on Wikipedia, which merely list article titles alphabetically and make no attempt to organize them hierarchically, annotate the entries, or cross-reference them. See:

See if there is a Manual of Style page about index pages. Also study Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge. Making an index of energy might be more difficult than making a Glossary of energy, since the style I would like to use doesn't seem to be the style that most people are currently using.

Energy-related wikis edit

17:35, 1 May 2008 (UTC): Wikipedia has a no original research policy. This is necessary on Wikipedia because of its nature, but it has the unfortunate side effect of limiting what users can write, when no published source already happens to say what they want to say. Since many topics relating to energy are controversial, not to mention speculative, look for other wikis which accept a wider range of content on the subject.

21:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC): here is an energy-related wiki that runs on MediaWiki:

07:48, 15 October 2008 (UTC): here is another wiki that runs on MediaWiki. It has pages about wind power on the Great Lakes, but at the moment the wiki seems to be broken (I was able to view Google's cached version of some of its pages).

Google custom search edit

The Green Maven site has a Google custom search on Web sites specializing in "green" topics.

WikiProjects edit

04:20, 16 August 2008 (UTC): I saw that User:GGByte is working on a WikiProject Renewable energy: User:GGByte/Renewable Energy.

WikiProject Energy edit

Add some more tasks to the to-do list for Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy:

Here are all the existing subpages of WikiProject Energy, so far:

Subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy

Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy/to do uses the {{tasks}} template, which looks too constraining. The {{tasks}} template seems to assume you only need to list the titles of some pages which presumably exist. There is no room to document anything about what to do, nor to describe generally how to create things which do not exist yet. This format would seem uninformative for new users who don't know anything about Wikipedia yet. See how some of the other well-developed WikiProjects handle their to-do lists. Maybe Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics has something better. See for example:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics has multiple subpages for managing ongoing work.

Rough notes about some of the things I would like to add to an expanded to-do list for Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy:

  • Wind power
  • Media files
    • Find all energy-related, freely-licensed images on Wikipedia and move them to Commons
    • Categorize all energy-related images on Commons
    • Geocode as many energy-related images as possible
    • Correctly identify the objects in the images (wind farm, turbine vendor, etc.)
    • Upload more images from Flickr to Commons

Articles that need cleanup edit

Global warming edit

09:26, 2 July 2009 (UTC): I'm getting a bit tired of reading endless skepticism/denial of anthropomorphic global warming on various Web sites (for example in the reader comments section of just about every article about global warming on a typical news site such as The Guardian). The scientific consensus is basically settled, but that doesn't stop unqualified people from parroting the denial arguments they heard on Fox News and right-wing talk radio. However, any effective strategy for Mitigation of global warming is certain to be highly non-transparent to the average person, to put it mildly, so it's fair for people to demand some convincing. Unfortunately, not many people understand the strength of scientific consensus.

  • Scientists can make mistakes, and occasionally large numbers of scientists have been wrong about things in the past. An example is Piltdown Man, a hoax that stood for 40 years before full exposure, but some scientists were skeptical from the outset. As more hominid fossils turned up elsewhere, Piltdown Man became harder to fit into the evolutionary sequence. This is unlike a scientific consensus for which each new bit of evidence tends to strengthen rather than weaken the consensus view.

However, for the most part scientists tend to be collectively very smart, which makes it difficult for large numbers of scientists to persist in egregious errors for long periods. With modern instrumentation, data collection methods, global communication, and many scientists checking each others' work, it is unlikely for an average untrained person to realize something that all the scientists missed. Not impossible, but very unlikely. Most objections to the AGW consensus are thus squarely in the newbie-FAQ category, the sort of thing that scientists would have recognized and checked from the start. Unfortunately, the average person isn't aware of that, and easily falls prey to unqualified question-raising of the Glenn Beck variety. To working scientists, having to answer newbie-FAQs is a waste of time, but unfortunately any effective response to global warming will require life-altering behavioral changes from everybody who currently burns substantial amounts of fossil fuels directly or indirectly, or who contributes to deforestation. Which would be nearly everyone in an industrialized or industrializing country, as well as anyone who chops down trees in a less-developed country. In short, almost everyone who has had contact with modern civilization.

Since Wikipedia has a neutral point of view policy, that puts Wikipedia editors in a tricky position when scientific consensus is so out of step with popular belief. Polls show that lots of people depart from the scientific consensus on AGW to varying degrees. A substantial minority reject the science outright, and another large fraction of people agree with the science but believe there is much more scientific debate on the issue than there really is. And only a vanishingly small fraction of people (at least where I live) have taken any substantial steps to cut their carbon footprints by the 90% or so that would be necessary to reduce the chance of dangerous global warming - which means the vast majority of people do not view global warming as being as important as their vacation plans and so on. It doesn't rise to the level of real-life importance for most people.

So anyway, one of the great strengths of wiki technology is that we can accumulate the results of questions and answers, so we can keep improving the answers by collaborative editing and we won't have to waste the rest of our lives repeatedly answering the same questions. But because Wikipedia is not a platform for advocacy, even if the habitability of the planet is at stake, the Constitution may actually be a suicide pact here. Therefore the most appropriate platform for collaboratively editing a global warming FAQ would probably be another wiki.

Here are some general sites that result from an obvious {{Google}} search:

  • answers to global warming skeptics
    • http://www.astronomynotes.com/solarsys/s11b.htm - Answers to Global Warming Skeptics: a list of questions with links to many other sites
    • http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/ - How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming
      • The above series has some good content, but the format is rather ugly compared to Wikipedia (in keeping with Teratornis' law: everything sucks compared to Wikipedia), the reader has to click all over to read each question one at a time on a separate page, and you have to scroll down each page individually to skip a bunch of irrelevant header garbage. I see no way to read the questions in compact order on one long page, or to scroll to the next question without having to scroll back to the contents page. Ugh.

Psychological aspects of Global Warming edit

Psychotherapist Rosemary Randall described her Cambridge-based project to reduce people's carbon footprint by engaging them in a series of 'carbon conversations'. She was puzzled by the fact that people who accepted the threat of climate change still didn't change their lifestyles accordingly. In response, her approach not only helps people understand their carbon footprints but also recognizes the key roll that psychology and emotion play in behaviour change. "We don't just talk about how to increase energy efficiency in a home, we talk about what makes a home a home." Typically, people who went through her six-meeting course cut one tonne from their carbon emissions in the first year and halved their emissions in two to five years.

Global warming denial edit

21:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC): this is an interesting subject. Some links:

08:50, 8 August 2009 (UTC): here some interesting posts on The Guardian about denialism by this user:

I saw an interesting video about an unrelated struggle of ideas:

in which "Jarret Brachman summarizes an interview of high-ranking al-Qaeda official Abu Yahya al-Libi (reportedly a likely successor to Osama bin Laden), in which al-Libi taunts the U.S. by offering six strategies the military could use to defeat the terror network."

  1. Amplifying backtrackers. People who used to be prominent members of al-Qaeda but who have since recanted "hurt al-Qaeda and hurt them badly."
  2. Fabrication and exaggeration. (I don't quite understand Brachman's point there.)
  3. Supporting anyone who announces religious rulings or fatwa against al-Qaeda.
  4. Introducing new voices. An insurgency is fundamentally predicated on eliminating distinctions between the insurgents and the host population. al-Qaeda understands that the more distinctions and shades of gray that are introduced within Islam, the worse it is for al-Qaeda.
  5. Symbolically degrading senior jihadists by releasing unflattering photos of them. (E.g., File:Khalid Shaikh Mohammed after capture.jpg.)
  6. Promoting the distinctions. (Salafist jihadism has evidently splintered.)

03:23, 6 March 2010 (UTC): a fascinating series of articles about the rabid right-wing populist version of climate change denial.

21:42, 29 May 2010 (UTC): a list of publications about climate change denial:

Key Scientific Developments since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report edit

08:42, 8 August 2009 (UTC): here is an interesting update:

Bjørn Lomborg vs. Myles Allen edit

02:00, 10 August 2009 (UTC): here is an interesting debate.

Michael Pawlyn edit

05:33, 11 August 2009 (UTC): here is an interesting video from Google:

His response to Bjørn Lomborg is also interesting:

Sea level edit

According to James Lovelock, sea level rise is the most definitive measure of global heating. Measures of global average (atmospheric, surface) temperature can fluctuate from year to year. Oceans, however, store far more heat than the atmosphere (the atmosphere has the heat capacity of a 3.2m layer of seawater). Thus a slight change in the rate of heat transfer between air and ocean can cause the atmosphere to cool or warm enough in a given year to mask the long-term temperature trend. When the oceans absorb heat, they expand, and sea level rises. It's hard to get rising seas on a cooling Earth.

Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States edit

04:58, 23 August 2010 (UTC): see my comment here:

The Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States article does not list emissions by economic sector. This information is available here:

It would be nice to make some diagrams similar to File:Greenhouse Gas by Sector.png, but for the US rather than the whole world, to illustrate this article. That would also show the differences between the relative amounts of greenhouse gases coming from given sectors in the US vs. globally. For example, in the US, the ratio of transport emissions to agricultural emissions is higher than for the whole world. This is because on global scale, most countries have agriculture, but few have motorized to the extent that the US has.

Copy-editing pass through global warming articles edit

05:06, 23 August 2010 (UTC): I'm reading through several articles relating to global warming and climate change, making small edits to add links and so on. Since I've read or edited a number of related articles, sometimes I can see where an article could have more links to articles I am familiar with, current links are not as specific as they could be, or terminology in one article is not consistent with terminology in another. Given the large number of articles and the complexity of the subject area, one expects to see some inconsistency.

Additionality edit

00:03, 6 September 2010 (UTC): the jargon term "Additionality" relates to projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The term is not yet in the Glossary of climate change but several articles mention it or define it:

Annex I countries edit

07:48, 6 September 2010 (UTC): some articles say "Annex I countries" (I=the letter I), and others say "Annex 1 countries" (1=1 (number)). Determine which is correct. {{Google Wikipedia}} does not make it obvious, as each variation appears in plenty of articles:

The UNFCCC site uses "Annex I" (with the letter I) so that may be canonical. For example:

Searching the UNFCCC site for "Annex 1" (number 1) finds some hits, but they don't seem to be in connection with the Annex I countries.

Enteric fermentation edit

09:15, 6 September 2010 (UTC): the Enteric fermentation article has a bit of a mess currently. A user added a claim that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, perhaps without realizing that the Carbon dioxide equivalent value for methane already accounts for this. Another user put strike tags around the claim rather than correcting it.

See also edit

Lists edit

References edit

07:02, 2 November 2009 (UTC): these are mostly garbaged references from a scratch editing section above. I'll clean them out later.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference RFA1E was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b c d Julia Duailibi (2008-04-27). "Ele é o falso vilão" (in Portuguese). Veja Magazine. Retrieved 2008-05-03.
  3. ^ a b c d Goettemoeller, Jeffrey; Adrian Goettemoeller (2007), Sustainable Ethanol: Biofuels, Biorefineries, Cellulosic Biomass, Flex-Fuel Vehicles, and Sustainable Farming for Energy Independence, Praire Oak Publishing, Maryville, Missouri, p. 42, ISBN 978-0-9786293-0-4{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ a b c d Cite error: The named reference Wilson was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Maria Helena Tachinardi (2008-06-13). "Por que a cana é melhor que o milho" (in Portuguese). Época Magazine. Retrieved 2008-08-06. Print editon pp. 73
  6. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference NYT100406 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference MLA_2004 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference WorldBank was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ a b Timothy Searchinger; et al. (2008-02-29). "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change". Science. 319 (5867): 1238–1240. doi:10.1126/science.1151861. PMID 18258860. Retrieved 2008-05-09. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help) Originally published online in Science Express on 7 February 2008. See Letters to Science by Wang and Haq. There are critics to these findings for assuming a worst case scenario.
  10. ^ "Another Inconvenient Truth" (PDF). Oxfam. 2008-06-28. Retrieved 2008-08-06.Oxfam Briefing Paper 114, figure 2 pp.8
  11. ^ a b Fargione; et al. (2008-02-29). "Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt". Science. 319 (5867): 1235–1238. doi:10.1126/science.1152747. PMID 18258862. Retrieved 2008-08-06. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help) Originally published online in Science Express on 7 February 2008. There are rebuttals to these findings for assuming a worst case scenario
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Folha Online was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ National Renewable Energy Laboratory USDoE (2007-09-17). "Data, Analysis and Trends: Light Duty E85 FFVs in Use (1998-2008)". Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center. Retrieved 2008-08-19. Trend of total FFVs in use from 1998-2008, based on FFV production rates and life expectancy (Excel file)
  14. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Apollo was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition (2008-08-08). "New E85 Stations". NEVC FYI Newsletter (Vol 14 no. 13). Retrieved 2008-08-19.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference ANP07_2008 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference ANP02_2008 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Brazil48_20 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ Energy Information Administration (August 2007). "Renewable Energy Consumption and Electricity Preliminary 2006 Statistics: Ethanol". EIA. Retrieved 2008-08-09.
  20. ^ Cite error: The named reference BEN2007 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  21. ^ Scottish Enterprise (2007) Scottish Enterprise Economic Impact Assessment Guidance, Version 1.0, Scottish Enterprise: Glasgow.
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