Power lines and links certainly have power capacities, and these can and do certainly limit renewables, but, as others have pointed out, electricity travels at a large fraction of the speed of light. In any real sense with respect to weather and wind power systems, electricity does not take time to move.

Denmark has low average windspeeds.

Microwave and fibre repeaters do the forwarding without waiting for the whole packet. They typically work bit-by-bit.

There may well be a little latency, but only a few bits at most, which at these speeds is inconsequential. There's no point in buffering when you're in the middle of a point-to-point link; that's only done when you may make routing decisions, but in a point-to-point link there's no decisions to be made.

Yes, stuff like that can happen. That's partly why they don't put wind turbines close to residential areas; also they are somewhat noisy in high winds at close range.

But if you mean, the tornado could carry the blades for miles, well yeah, but a tornado that big is going to fuck up so much other shit than the wind turbines that that's the least of your troubles.

Well, wind turbines do indeed raise power costs.

By about 0.3-0.6c per kWh.

Onshore wind power just isn't very expensive.

Denmark is currently running 40% wind power, and their wind is pretty shitty. And they're going for 85% wind power.

BULLSHIT

My parents live about a kilometre from a wind turbine, and you can NEVER hear it.

I'll tell you what does travel far though: lies about infrasonic noise supposedly generated by wind turbines in significant quantities.

> The other issue with wind power is that it can vary uncontrollably minute by minute. This is the kind of instability that needs to be leveled out by more storage.

You are wrong.

While wind power in any individual turbine can do that, the total power generated across a reasonably large grid, cannot. The power variations average out.

What happens is that the weather systems move across the grid, and this massively smooths out the changes at the short time scales (minutes). At the longer time scales, like hours-days - this doesn't help, but the kinds of instabilities you're referring to, these disappear.

The hours-days variations are usually proposed to be dealt with by using a mix of power sources,such as using solar and other renewables, particularly, if available, some hydroelectricity and (perhaps) batteries for any remaining.

I don't agree, aluminium is not easy to ignite at all in any kind of sustained way, unless you melt it and turn it into a spray, or you powder it (but then a lot of powders are pretty damn flammable), or you use high oxygen partial pressures.

Whereas, magnesium is not that hard to ignite, and it self sustains at normal atmospheric oxygen partial pressures.

For how many kilowatts though?

The price of solar panels is getting down to about $1/watt (peak) right now, and you get about 1-2 kWh per kW (peak) per day production depending on your latitude and climate.

It's unclear that they 'aren't doing anything illegal'. Even the New York Stock Exchange itself was fined after the flash crash.

Whether it is ethical or not, I suspect that the people involved will shortly be making a 'voluntary payment,' probably 'without admitting wrongdoing' after the regulators have asked pointed questions comparing the actions of their bot against those of the relevant standards.

Outwitting other bots isn't a crime, but market manipulation is.

You're not allowed to run prices down, purely to get them on the upswing.

And that's specifically what he seems to have been doing.

This isn't a technical problem, it's an ethical problem. The markets aren't there for this sort of thing, they're primarily there to fund businesses.

It's certainly not a 'hoax'. Coal contains (to varying degrees) all of these pollutants.

Coal plants do often have filters these days, but always:

http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerp...

the emissions are significant, and not everything gets filtered out.

Also the filtering is expensive and the carbon dioxide that coal emits is becoming a *massive* problem. Although carbon capture has been trialled, it makes coal non competitive with other technologies.

I can't speak to the chemical plants near you but with nuclear power, you always have incredibly dirty radioactive materials inside a container, with lots of complex plumbing leading into it, and under worst case conditions that stuff can potentially always get into the air and water and get spread far and wide.

Although in principle we could make it never fail over the lifetime of human beings, in practice, we as a species, don't know how to do that, and the proliferative effects of nuclear power and their association with nuclear bombs cannot be underestimated either.

To make nuclear power completely safe, is like trying to make water not wet. It's built into the nature of what we are doing with the materials, for utility-scale nuclear power they are always on the edge of melting down.

Because of these inherent properties it's also never been cheap; the extensive containment and safety you need to engage in, seriously impairs the economics and what you have to do to get around that problem, renders it an inflexible source of power. You have to run it essentially flat out to get the kWh price down to reasonable figures. The most successful systems (like in France) have hydroelectricity or other additional flexible supplies to balance out the power. But if you have that anyway, then overall, technologies like wind power are now usually cheaper and incredibly less risky and easier to install, and compared to nuclear power which is a more mature technology, still getting significantly cheaper over time.

Throwing money at such inherently risky technology like nuclear power to try to make it less risky is not a wise investment right now, and all the signs are that it is only getting less wise with time, other technologies are rapidly rendering it moot.

In Japan, they found at one point that there was a possibility of it *seriously* going to hell in a hand basket.

If the wind had been really wrong, it would have put serious fallout over Tokyo; which would have been really, really, really bad. While few people would have died, the economic disruption would have been (without any hyperbole) unbelievably stupendous.

http://world.time.com/2012/02/...

You can tell me all you want that this kind of accident can never happen, but I just don't believe it. We have no reason to think that Chernobyl or Fukushima were the worse cases, nor that these kinds of failures cannot happen again worse.