Now how about François Legault stops trying to privatize hydro that saves everyone money
But how are investors going to get rich if this essential service isn’t privatized?!?!?
5,000 sq. km 400 new turbines
Okay cbc, how do those numbers add up?
One turbine for every 12.5km²? Seems like a pretty reasonable spread accounting for space in between and geographical features they may have to avoid.
Is that normal now? The ones pictured in the article and all of those I’ve personally seen are more closely spaced. But guess they’ve been getting bigger over time and it would be on-brand for Hydro Québec to go for extra large ones with a few kilometers between them.
… just looking at numbers from around the web it seems like even the largest turbines around don’t normally require that much area. 5000km² seems like roughly an order of magnitude more space than might be expected. I imagine it’s probably the total area of the region they’ll be built somewhere inside of.
Yeah, I think you are right in that idea. Realistically they will be clumped in high wind areas within that 5000km².
la zone Chamouchouane est d’une superficie d’environ 5 000 km2 et se démarque par la qualité et l’ampleur de son potentiel éolien.
Yeah, that’d be where it came from. Anyway I was just trying to mentally compare the size of a wind farm to the size of a typical hydro reservoir. Conclusion: They’re both pretty big.
Wind seems like a great complement to existing hydro capacity. Wind is a clean and renewable energy source which can provide considerable amounts of power. The problem of course is what happens when the wind does not blow. It is also possible to generate more than you need sometimes even when you struggle to meet demand at other times. Wind is inconsistent. It is hard to map capacity to demand.
The environmental damage of hydro is putting it in place to begin with. Once the dams are built is is pretty clean. Hydro can provide consistent power at any time. The concern with hydro is that, as you use it, the reservoirs go down. If you use it continuously, the water levels can drop faster than they are being replenished eventually leading to a problem. So, the problem with hydro is that it offers only so much total power before more dams have to be built ( which creates significant environmental damage ). You cannot really have too much capacity with hydro as you just let the water flow if the reservoirs are full.
If you are generating lots of wind power, you need less hydro and the reservoirs fill up. They act like a battery. If the wind power drops, you can ramp up the hydro until the wind comes back.
Together, hydro and wind create an electrical power system with significant capacity, consistent availability, and the ability to service spikes in demand while remaining green and renewable. Add as much wind as you need to create overall capacity. Use the hydro to smoothly match power delivery with demand.
Well, I guess wind is a fluid
