US Investor seeks 700 million dollars in damages from Poland

Dom, I'm not disputing your knowledge of hydro-electric energy, but how do you respond to this? I haven't lived in my home country for many years. A Pole who has been living there for half the time I've lived here in Poland knows much more about life on the ground in the UK than I do.

We don't anymore

They cost $1-$4 mil per turbine.. that's why

You don't need a waterfalls.
All you need is a swift current in a river to turn the turbines.
A simple example is it doesn't take much current from a river to turn a big gear which turns a smaller gear which turns a smaller gear until the smallest gear is spinning faster then lightening generating electricity.

I didn't say anything about water falls, but about water falling, or going from a higher place to a lower place, like the bowling ball I mentioned. Water flows because it is falling downhill. The bigger the hill, the more energy it releases on its trip from top to bottom. The problem in Poland is that there are very few big hills for water to run down, so the potential energy is very low. Hydroelectric power depends on two things: the volume of water moving through the turbines, and the difference in height that it drops. Poland has the first, but it doesn't have the second.

A hydroelectric dam is, though, essentially a large artificial waterfall. When the water flows over the edge, it move the turbines, like a pinwheel in the wind. The higher the dam, the faster the water falls, and the faster the turbines can turn, producing more electricity. Just like the pinwheel spins faster when the air blows faster. And the higher the difference in height the water travels downwards, the more energy it releases, and the cheaper and easier it gets to get energy from.


A swift current happens when water moves down a big hill, that is, when there is a large height distance. The steeper the hill, the faster the current, and the more energy you can get from it. On the plains of Poland, there are no big hills, so the rivers are not very swift. So the energy you can get from them is generally is worth less than the cost of building a hydroelectric plant that could harness it.


That doesn't make any difference (in terms of energy production). The energy produced by the flow of the water remains the same. Gears can't create energy, only transmit it. So the output of the turbine remains the same. What would happen is that you can turn only a much smaller turbine, which produces much less electricity.

You seem to be thinking about waterwheels, which were once used to power mills. Yes, those are possible even on slow rivers. But even in the old days, the lazier the river, the bigger the waterwheel you had to build. It was more economical to either build them on swift streams, or to build a dam. Waterwheels like that were not very efficient, which is why you rarely see them nowadays. And their power output was minuscule compared to a hydroelectric dam. Like a gazillionth of what a good dam produces.

The gearboxes are what make a turbine efficient.
They spin the magnets that create the electricity.
Underwater turbine advantages are that water is more dense than air, which means that an underwater turbine can reach the necessary rotating speeds for electrical generation from very slow moving water.

A wind turbine needs much higher wind speeds to operate efficiently than the water current speed needed to operate an underwater turbine.
One megawatt is enough to run a thousand homes in the U.S.A.
And then there is nuclear. :-)

@johnny reb

That's all irrelevant. The energy you can get is determined by the head (height) the water descends. Gears do not create energy. Gravity does. You're thinking of gears as some sort of magical solution. Physics doesn't work that way.

The biggest (non-pumped storage) hydroelectric power station in Poland is actually down on the plain, built on the Wisła river at Włocławek, a place on the river where it's marginally feasible to extract energy. It produces only about 160 MW of power, which is not that large for a hydroelectric installation. Hoover Dam produces 13 times as much. The Grand Coulee Dam produces 42 times as much, and the Three Gorges Dam in China produces a whopping 140 times as much. Why? Mainly height.

The dam at Wrocławek was built during Communist times, mostly as a showpiece, and probably would not be built today because it is not economical. In fact, there's talk of getting rid of it. The original plans for the project included the building more dams along the Wisła, but those plans were abandoned because they were not economically feasible.

Think of it this way. You want to make a living by picking up quarters from the ground. This would make sense in a place where there were dozens of quarters per square foot lying on the ground. It wouldn't make sense in a place where there were only a few quarters per acre. You would spend more time and energy looking for them than they are worth.

Large rapid streams in mountainous areas are lots of quarters. Slow streams on the plains are a lot fewer quarters. So are small rapid streams in mountainous areas. Poland doesn't have any large rapid streams in mountainous areas. All it has are the other two.

I beg to differ as they even use ocean currents to generate electricity.
Where is the height of the current there that the water decends ?


Nope, they convert a slow moving wheel into a fast moving wheel which moves the magnets that create energy.


Actually I am just conveying what I have read about how water turbines work to create energy.
And you can run a turbine with slow moving water.
What ever happened to the nuclear plant that Poland built ?

That's a completely different principle that does not apply to inland waters, including rivers. In that case, the water is basically being pushed by the rotation of the earth rather than by gravity. River currents are generated by water flowing downhill, driven by gravity. No height difference, no flow.


Yes, you can, as I said, But you are not going to be able to get much energy from it, and getting that energy is going to be a lot more costly than running a turbine with a fast moving stream. Often so costly that it exceeds the value of the electricity you get from it, as is the case in Poland.

Like I said, even the largest hydroelectric plant on the largest river in Poland produces a rather disappointing 160 MW. Nor are there any other places you can build anything near the generation capacity of that dam in Poland. Poland has already reached peak hydroelectric production, and there is no possibility of expansion. Just about every (non-pump storage) hydroelectric plant that can be built has already been built, and those few that haven't are extremely low capacity and/or prohibitively costly.

I've been looking for information about hydroelectric power in Poland in English, and, unsurprisingly, didn't find much. I did find a good simple explanation about how hydropower works, though. Here's the link:

wvic.com/Content/How_Hydropower_Works.cfm

It basically says what I have written before.


Poland never built a nuclear power plant. There were plans, and construction actually started, but then Chernobyl happened and the plant was left unfinished. Subsequent plans never made it past the talking stage. Then there were plans to work together with Lithuania and Latvia to co-finance a plant in Lithuania. Nothing has come of that yet, and probably never will.

Nuclear is far to expensive, Solar and wind are several times cheaper.


power generation is quoted in $ per kwhr

No shyt, but that doesn't change the fact an investor has to put up $1-$4 million per turbine (1-2 for 1mwh, 2-4 for 2mwh). Not to mention their noisy asf and destroy property values of the local community. Poland doesn't really have high winds.

The reported per kwh cost doesn't take into account tax payer funded subsidies and other secondary costs as well

Depending on which factors are included, estimates for the cost of wind power vary wildly. Lazard claims the cost of wind power ranges from $37 to $81 per megawatt-hour, while Michael Giberson at the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University suggests it's closer to $149. Our analysis in an upcoming report explores this wide gap in cost estimates, finding that most studies underestimate the genuine cost of wind because they overlook key factors.

All estimates for wind power include the cost of purchasing capital and paying for operations and maintenance (O&M) of wind turbines. For the studies we examined, capital costs ranged from $48 to $88 per megawatt-hour, while O&M costs ranged from $9.8 to $21 per megawatt-hour.

Many estimates, however, don't include costs related to the inherent unreliability of wind power and government subsidies and mandates. Since we can't ensure the wind always blows, or how strongly, coal and natural gas plants must be kept on as backup to compensate when it's calm. This is known as baseload cycling, and its cost ranges from $2 to $23 per megawatt-hour.... The best estimate available for the total cost of wind power is $149 per megawatt-hour, taken from Giberson's 2013 report.

newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480

Poland isn't a very windy country... I don't think wind turbines would be an effective answer. Solar maybe even more so...

Then again, idk, I'm not an expert in this industry... Some pro-clean sources claim wind is far cheaper, some pro-coal ones claim the opposite, neutral sources seem to be all over the place.. According to forbes though, wind is only slightly more expensive than coal with nuclear and hydro the cheapest.

forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/15/the-naked-cost-of-energy-stripping-away-financing-and-subsidies/#7b3127d95b88

But again this is going by US - different situation in other countries...

Most of Poland's energy comes from coal still from what I understand, mainly due to the strength of the lobby, large amount of people employed in this business, and the coal deposits.

No, they are actually quieter than a normal conversation when at their closest permitted distance to a house, about as loud as a fridge.

If there's only one or several, yes. If you drive by a massive wind farm (like the one with around 100-150+ wind turbines on a plain not too far from me), you can hear it all the time when they're active. It's like a weird humming. Idk about you, but I wouldn't want a humming and swooshing at the sound level of a 'normal conversation' in my bedroom when I have precious few hours before I need to wake up the next day.

@Dirk diggler

Pretty much a moot question, anyway. Poland has already built just about all the onshore turbines it can profitably build, and any further installations will be off shore. Poland really got shafted in the energy department:

Geothermal: very low potential
Hydropower: very low potential
Tidal power: very low potential
Solar: very low potential
Biofuel: very low potential
Onshore wind: very low potential
Offshore wind: modest potential, at best
Gas and oil: modest potential, but difficult to exploit
Nuclear: total lack of political, popular and investor interest

Leaving just coal as its only real resource.

@DominicB

Yeah pretty much... Unless they want to buy gas from Russia... it seems though they prefer importing more expensive US gas and oil than giving the money to Russia though lol