U of T knows which way the wind blows
(PhysOrg.com) -- How do you fight climate change while creating electricity formore than a million households? The answer is blowing in the wind. According to U of T geography professor and energy policy expert Danny Harvey, wind farms could make a significant contribution to our efforts to curb climate change.
Harvey has been studying options to phase out the use of fossil fuels since 2001 and completed his PhD on climate modelling at U of T before he began teaching here in 1986. He will publish two books on the topic in the spring: Energy and the New Reality: Volume 1 and Energy and the New Reality: Volume 2: C-Free Energy (Earthscan, London, UK).
"I wrote these books because I wanted to answer formyself the questions: Is there any way out of this dilemma? Can we get off fossil fuels and how?" he said. "These books are my own attempt to make an objective, critical and consistent examination of the different options."
Harvey concluded that wind farming is one of the key mitigation technologies in the energy sector when it comes to sustainable production and, he noted, we'll never run out of it.
He explained his motivation: "There is no scientific doubt that global warming is a serious problem that demands immediate and strong action and so I've moved more now into the area of, What the hell are we going to do about it?"
The question remaining is where to build wind farms. Toronto Hydro recently proposed installing 60 turbines in Lake Ontario in an area roughly spanning Scarborough to Ajax.
A wind farm the size proposed for Lake Ontario could generate up to 200 megawatts (MW). (One megawatt powers at least 250 to 500 homes.)
Harvey thinks this proposal is a great idea but explained the limitations of the Lake Ontario site and why he thinks Lake Erie would be an even better prospect.
"There are fairly good winds offshore in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario too, but Lake Ontario tends to be deeper so you can't go too far offshore. It's close to the city so the transmission costs will be minimal but you're not going to be able to install thatmany," he said. "Now, if you go offshore in Lake Erie you could install 1,000 turbines of 5MW capacity each on the Canadian side, in water no deeper than 25 metres and no closer than 10 kilometres to the shore and still leave lots of room for shipping.
"When you go offshore you can put in bigger turbines, in part because it is very hard to move them by land," he said.
And, he noted, it doesn't really cost that much. "Nuclear cost estimates are now settling in at around $4,000 to 6,000 per kilowatt of capacity while large scale offshore wind farms can be expected to cost about $2,000/kW. When other factors are taken into account, this translates into about the same or lower cost for electricity from wind but without the one million-year radioactive waste legacy of nuclear energy."
The impact wind farms could have inmitigating climate change could be enormous, Harvey said.
"The key to getting us off fossil fuels -- and we are facing a global ecological disaster if we don't -- is energy efficiency, absolutely first and foremost. This is followed by wind energy and solar energy and some very well thought out uses of biomass on the supply side," he said.
Provided by University of Toronto
