Talk:Wind power in the United States

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Anantvis.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 13:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wind energy meteorology

The boundary layer wind, e.g. 100 m wind, is controlled by the wind condition in free atmosphere, perturbed by fast varying turbulence in the boundary layer. Strong winds in the free atmosphere lead to strong boundary layer winds near the surface, and consequently high instantaneous values for the capacity factors of wind turbines. The problem with the output from a single wind farm located in any particular region is that it is variable on time scales ranging from minutes to days posing difficulties for incorporating relevant outputs into an integrated power system. The high frequency variability of contributions from individual wind farms is determined mainly by locally generated small scale boundary layer. The low frequency variability is associated with the passage of transient waves in the atmosphere with a characteristic time scale of several days. Moreover, the Central Plains region of US is under the influence of the large scale metrological transient waves. Electricity generated by one wind farm located in the Central Plains region is not independent of the electricity output from another wind facility in the same region.

First of all, to my knowledge, there is no such thing as instantaneous capacity factors. This does not make sense. [EDIT: Actually it does, now that I've thought about it more.] Secondly, the phenomena which is being discussed doesn't appear to be specific to the United States. Hence the information may be better suited to the more general article Wind Power. Thirdly - the information in the paragraph(and possibly the article) seems merely to say that the output from wind farms in a region is correlated and not independent. This is not new info. and is mentioned in the Wind power article. It could be mentined in this article as well. Aflafla1 (talk) 04:27, 24 October 2014 (UTC

Ok, the following is my proposed revised text:

Winds in the Central plains region of the U.S. are variable on both short (minutes) and long (days) time scales. Variations in wind speed result in variations in power output from wind farms, which poses difficulties incorporating wind power into an integrated power system. Wind turbies are driven by boundary layer winds, those that occur near the surface of the earth, at around 300 feet. Boundry layer winds are controlled by wind in the higher free atmosphere and have turbulence due to interaction with surface features such as trees, hills, and buildings. Short term or high frequency variations are due to this turbulence in the boundary layer. Long term variations are due to the passage of transient waves in the atmosphere, with a characteristic time scale of several days.

The transient waves ar that influence wind in the Central U.S. are large scale and this results in the power output from wind farms in the region being correlated and not independent.

References

Additions to the "Environmental Regulations" Section

I plan to add some relevant content under the section Environmental Regulations Here is a list of plausible resources to be used https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67624.pdf https://www.awea.org/MakingittotheTop https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/wv_chapter2_wind_power_in_the_united_states.pdf http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7286288 https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/renewable-energy/wind https://www.eia.gov/renewable/data.php Anantvis (talk) 01:12, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Bird concerns

This article is being swamped by exaggerated concerns about wind farms and birds - classic case of one-note advocacy taking over an article. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 01:20, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

agreed. --74.38.73.235 (talk) 14:02, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

If the concerns are exaggerated, the way to deal with that is by adding balanced reliable sources. But perhaps even more exaggerated is your contention that the article is being "swamped" and "taken over" by the issue. Out of an article of 88,804 bytes, less than 9 percent is about bird concerns. The article is hardly being "taken over." Regards. Plazak (talk) 21:08, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

To have a more balanced section on birds, this could be of interest: [1]. However, I think most of the discussion should be moved to Wind power, since it's not an issue specific to the US. --Ita140188 (talk) 00:15, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Units

The convenience of the SI (system International) is that every thousand of one unit can be given in the next Unit up the scale. 1000 MW or 1 GW. I'd like to propose that all the Thousands and Millions of megawatts be given in either gigawatts or terawatts instead of saying for example 125 000 MW. People are already used to megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes. Avi8tor (talk) 14:37, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

In the industry, energy is talked about in terms of Megawatt-Hours. For talking about capacity, I'm fine with using the appropriate SI prefix. That would be good. --Aflafla1 (talk) 06:32, 6 February 2019 (UTC)