THIS is not what President-elect Barack Obama’s energy and climate strategists would want to hear. It would be anathema to Al Gore and other assorted luminaries touting renewable energy sources which in one giant swoop will save the world from the “tyranny” of fossil fuels and mitigate global warming. And as if these were not big enough issues, oilman T. Boone Pickens’ grandiose plan for wind farms from Texas to Canada is supposed to bring about a replacement for the natural gas now used for power generation. That move will then lead to energy independence from foreign oil.
Too good to be true? Yes, and in fact it is a lot worse, according to Peter Glover and Michael Economides writing in the Energy Tribune. Their article continues:
Wind has been the cornerstone of almost all environmentalist and social engineering proclamations for more than three decades and has accelerated to a crescendo the last few years in both the United States and the European Union.
But Europe, getting a head start, has had to cope with the reality borne by experience and it is a pretty ugly picture.
Independent reports have consistently revealed an industry plagued by high construction and maintenance costs, highly volatile reliability and a voracious appetite for taxpayer subsidies. Such is the economic strain on taxpayer funds being poured into wind power by Europe’s early pioneers — Denmark, Germany and Spain – that all have recently been forced to scale back their investments.
As a result this summer, the U.K., under pressure to meet an ambitious E.U. climate target of 20 percent carbon dioxide cuts by 2020, assumed the mantle of world leader in wind power production. It did so as a direct consequence of the U.K. Government’s Renewables Obligations Certificate, a financial incentive scheme for power companies to build wind farms. Thus the U.K.’s wind operation provides the ideal case study — and one that provides the most complete conclusions.
The U.K. has all the natural advantages. It is the windiest country in Europe. It has one of the continent’s longest coastlines for the more productive (and less obtrusive) offshore farms. It has a long-established national power grid. In short, if wind power is less than successful in the U.K., its success is not guaranteed anywhere.
But wind infrastructure has come at a steep price. In fiscal year 2007-08 U.K. electricity customers were forced to pay a total of over $1 billion to the owners of wind turbines. That figure is due to rise to over $6 billion a year by 2020 given the government’s unprecedented plan to build a nationwide infrastructure with some 25 gigawatts of wind capacity, in a bid to shift away from fossil fuel use.
Ofgem, which regulates the U.K.’s electricity and gas markets, has already expressed its concern at the burgeoning tab being picked up by the British taxpayer which, they claim, is “grossly distorting the market” while hiding the real cost of wind power. In the past year alone, prices for electricity and natural gas in the U.K. have risen twice as fast as the European Union average according to figures released in November by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While 15 percent energy price rises were experienced across the E.U., in the U.K. gas and electricity prices rose by a staggering 29.7 percent. Ofgem believes wind subsidy has been a prime factor and questions the logic when, for all the public investment, wind produces a mere 1.3 percent of the U.K.’s energy needs.
In May 2008, a report from Cambridge Energy Research Associates warned that an over-reliance on offshore wind farms to meet European renewable energy targets would further create supply problems and drive up investor costs. No taxpayer respite there. But worse news was to come.
In June, the most in-depth independent assessment yet of Britain’s expanding wind turbine industry was published. In the journal Energy Policy gas turbine expert Jim Oswald and his co-authors, came up with a series of damning conclusions: not only is wind power far more expensive and unreliable than previously thought, it cannot avoid using high levels of natural gas, which not only it will increase costs but in turn will mean far less of a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions than has been claimed.
Oswald’s report highlights the key issue of load factor, the actual power generated compared to the theoretical maximum, and how critical it is to the viability of the wind power industry. In 2006, according to U.K. government statistics, the average load factor for wind turbines across the U.K. was 27.4 percent. Thus a typical 2 megawatt turbine actually produced only 0.54 MW of power on an average day. The worst performing U.K. turbine had a load factor of just 7 percent. These figures reflect a poor return on investment. But this poor return is often obscured by the subsidy system that allows turbine operators and supporters to claim they can make a profit even when turbines operate at a very low load factors. So what’s the bottom line? British consumers are paying twice over for their electricity, funding its means of production and paying for its use as end users.
Variability is one of the chief criticisms levelled at wind power. When the wind drops or blows too hard, turbines stop spinning and you get no power. Wind turbine advocates have claimed that this can be avoided by the geographical spread of wind farms, perhaps by creating an international “supergrid.” But, as Oswald’s report makes clear, calm conditions not only prevail on a fairly regular basis, they often extend across the country with the same conditions being experienced as far away as France and Germany. Worse still, says Oswald, long periods of calm over recent decades occurred in the dead of winter when electricity demand is highest.
Periods of low wind means a need for pumped storage and essential back-up facilities. Oswald told The Register online news service that a realistically feasible U.K. pumped-storage base would only cope with one or two days of low winds at best. As regards back-up facilities, Oswald states the only feasible systems for the planned 25 gigawatt wind system would be one that relied equally on old-style natural gas turbines. As Oswald says however, the expense of a threefold wind, pump storage and gas turbine back-up solution “would be ridiculous.”
The problems don’t end there. The British report highlights what more and more wind farms would mean when it came to installing gas turbine back-ups. “Electricity operators will respond by installing lower-cost plant ($/kW) as high capital plant is not justified under low utilisation regimes.”
But cheap gas turbines are far less efficient than big, properly sized base-load turbines and will not be as resilient in coping with the heavy load cycling they would experience. Cheaper, less resilient plants will mean high maintenance costs and spare back-up gas turbines to replace broken ones that would suffer regular thermal stress cracking. And of course, the increasing use of gas for the turbines would have a detrimental effect on reducing carbon dioxide emission – always one of the chief factors behind the wind revolution.
Oswald’s report concludes also that the all this wear and tear will further stress the gas pipeline network and gas storage system. “High-efficiency base load plant is not designed or developed for load cycling,” says Oswald. Critically, most of the issues raised in the independent report have not been factored into the cost of wind calculations. With typical British understatement, Oswald concludes that claims for wind power are “unduly optimistic.”
We think they’ve been blown away.
Republished from the Energy Tribune with permission from Peter Glover.
The picture was taken near Port Lincoln, South Australia, by Jennifer Marohasy in May 2007.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I used to be a wind supporter until I looked into the figures.
I understand that Denmark has the highest wind farm ratio – around 20% of electricity production – yet since their installation not one coal fired plant has been decommissioned because they have to remain operating as a backup for when the wind dies. Unfortunately you can’t turn a coal power station on and off.
Apparently when the wind does blow the power generated is sold to the European Grid at a cheap rate.
And no one with a bit of common sense could not see this coming? Give me a break!!!
And while they out checking figures get these economists to check out the cost efficiencies of Solar as well.
Why is the tone of debate here invariably either alternative or fossil fuel – an artificial dichotomy.
Surely augmenting the grid with locally generated alternative energy production is useful in that it reduces the load on the fossil system? While Denmark may not have decommissioned a single coal-fired station, I presume they haven’t needed to commission any new ones either?
Burn, baby, burn.
Concerning capacity factor, power variability etc for AUSTRALIAN windfarms does anyone have actual figures?
Looking for these all I can find are “projected” figures which appear to br optomistic to say the least.
For example I have never seen a claimed capacity factor (actual power output/installed power output) less then 32% and as high as 40%. These figures seem to be much higher than say those achieved in the UK of about 25% – one of the windiest places on earth so I am told.
I have tried contacting the windfarm operators but nobody wants to declare such figures. I wonder why.
If the planet is facing a real and present danger fron anthropogenic CO2 why stuff about – just instal nuclear plants ASAP.
I’d agree with Slim and add that the tone of the article is rather angry and defensive (the “social engineering proclamations” phrase is a bit of a give away). As to its substance I’m sure there are plenty of others who could balance the claims. Overall though the authors offer no solutions to the known problems of generating power via fossil fuels or the ones they claim exist with wind power. So a bit of a waste of everybodys time really. But then it’s a bit like that around here, isn’t it?
Patrick B
“social engineering proclamations” is a give-away to … what, exactly ?
“As to its substance I’m sure there are plenty of others who could balance the claims. ” These are not claims – they are facts. Now balance them with other facts, not wishful thinking.
There are other choices. Try nuclear power – and before you explode like a firecracker, examine the actual use and spread of nuclear power across the globe. Again, use facts, not wishful thinking and unsubstantiated propaganda.
Then carefully examine the actual contribution of solar power (ie. the actual % of grid input) in the most advanced country for this – Germany. And then examine the actual % breakdown of Germany’s power supply technologies.
Since you won’t, of course, it’s pretty much a waste of time … I agree with that.
The important thing is to never let these leftist goons secure subsidies for any of their schemes. That way there will only be an appropriate amount of wind power where it is in fact cost-effective. There is an area off the coast of Maine that some people have discovered that is basically a cyclonic system during the entirety of the Winter. And its thought that enourmous amounts of wind-electricity can be generated there. So in some places it could be economic. But subsidies make even viable technologies a burden.
I’m not saying it’s either/or Slim – I’m just saying as an alternative power source they aren’t very efficient and require ongoing maintenance. I’ve spoken to US citizens who drive past wind farms regularly who tell me that half the units are out of action for repairs all the time.
I’m sure Louis has stood on the wharf at Derby or Wyndham and seen the emense tidal power yet they cancelled the proposed power stations this power is screaming out for as it’s consistent, it’s there everyday and you could probably run two aluminium smelters off it.
The coastal current that Nemo cruised down is another option we should be investigating because it’s consistent.
What you consider inefficient or unreliable is not relevant when you are talking about renewable energy resources – its not like you can waste the wind. The maintenance and reliability issues are important only insofar as they impact on the economics. I laughed when i saw the apparent criticism that wind turbines require ‘ongoing maintenance’, as though that wasn’t a consideration for coal fired power stations!
In Australia windfarms are cost effective with the help of MRET. MRET was giving about $40 per MWh for windfarms, and given the wholesale price of electricity was about $35-$40 per MWh, that means that wind energy in Australia, with its inefficiencies and maintenance requirements etc, is economic at $75-$80 per MWh.
In Australia, wind farms don’t typically get additional subsidies on top of MRET – there is just MRET. So if for whatever reason the wind turbines were less reliable than the developers thought, or less efficient, or more problematic, then you’d see all the wind farm owners losing enormous amounts of money and the Australian wind industry deteriorating – which isn’t happening. So that’s how much it costs – its a fact that is verified by the marketplace.
I think you’ll find that nuclear energy would have a challenging time trying to achieve that price in Australia (Ziggy Switkowski thinks it would be cheaper than that, but i’m pretty skeptical,especially for the first few) – even if nuclear can manage to compete economically with wind power in Australia, it will also need massive subsidies in order to compete with coal.
I’d be happy to see the option for nuclear power made permissible by the govt, but I am certain that you won’t see a nuclear power station in Australia even if the government were to remove its opposition to it, *unless* the government was actually pro-active in supporting it – not just with huge subsidies, but with guaranteed planning approval and all sorts of political concessions. If you want to build a 2gigawatt nuclear power plant which produces electricity at 1.5 to 2x the cost of wholesale electricity in this country, then i’ll leave you to do the math as to what kind of subsidy would be required for that to work.
There is a reason why wind power is so successful, and its not simply because of govt subsidies, though there is that of course. Its successful because it is commercially extremely mature, cheap as far as alternative energy goes, and is quick and modular to install…relative to a nuclear power station.
PS. Australia has about 800 MW of wind power, which I guestimate produces about 2,100 GWh per year. At a RECS price of $40 per MWH (it fluctuates a lot) that costs about $84million per year in RECS purchases by electricity retailers, who presumably fund that purchase by increasing prices. so thats about an extra $4 per year per Australian.
“What you consider inefficient or unreliable is not relevant when you are talking about renewable energy resources – its not like you can waste the wind.”
I agree but some are more or less efficient relevant to each other as the generator is a finite cost. Stacking a series of 2- 3 MW wind generators in rows in fluctuating wind is not exactly the most cost efficient system so far IMO.
There was a company in Maclean in northern NSW who developed the Aquinator http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/26/1096137100758.html but it appears it never received the necessary funding to continue yet the concept of tapping the consistent coastal currents appeared to be a good area to test IMO.
Wind has been a source of energy, developed and refined since early civilisation yet it has always been limited even though it is often excessive.
The US has had wind turbines since the ’70s and are aware how limited they are.
As Oswald said, the expense of wind, pump storage and fossil back-up needed to produce reliable wind energy is just ridiculous.
Economic suicide.
All these loony wind power schemes fall by the wayside when the subsidies are removed and the realisation that you still need normal power generating methods to fill in for when the wind is not available puts the total price through the roof.
Now if only we could harness all the hot air generated by politicians and ecomentalists…sigh!
Good points made by all but it’s a pity we never studied electrical engineering, (and I am frantically updating my knowledge on this topic), otherwise we might have another, almost inexhaustable, source of energy – the Earth’s MEASURED electric field maintained by the solar electric currents now identified by NASA.
It’s amazing, isn’t it – the Greens, despising capitalism and its consumption of oil and coal, are immersed in a natural force orders of magnitude larger than gravity, and have no idea how to harness that “hidden” force, AKA electricity.
The blindspot is belief.
A solution might be found in Tesla’s experiments (sorry Lamprey, NT, SJT and other lefty twits).
Funny you should mention this Louis, I just received a book as a birthday present, “Forgotten inventions” and it mentions Tesla and a few other earlier mechanical inventions that never materialised either because lack of financial backing (admittedly, sometimes because of the paranoid secrecy of the inventor) but mostly because the established “science” did not understand the principles.
Also mentions a T H Moray who’s working experimental model was witnessed and documented by several people, and patented in the USA.
This invention actually used , according to the inventor, power from the space as we now call it.
Unfortunately my copy is in Hungarian, (ISBN 963 03 9024 8) don’t know if it’s available in English or not
Steve would have us all believe that everything is just hunky dory in the Australian wind industry but I seem to recall loads of spam from Hepburn Wind and an extended “deadline” for funding contributors because they only got 20% of what they asked for. The investors have stayed away in droves, not least for the fact that the project is not run under a company structure (where prospectus rules on veracity of projections would apply) but under a co-op scheme where the turkey that invests $1,000 gets the same voting power as the guy who invests $100,000.
Gosh, great deal, I’ll write my cheque just as soon as I complete the purchase of this bridge.
Slim: “Why is the tone of debate here invariably either alternative or fossil fuel – an artificial dichotomy.”
That’s being mealy mouthed. You can’t claim to be walking the path of sweet moderation when you want wind power by taxation and coercion. To paraphrase Bird above: knock yourself out. Build as many turbines as you like but do it on your own coin.
I have a few times tried to calculate what would be needed to replace our current electricity with “Alternative” energy. First how much would we need? The best I can find is the Abare report this claimed that by 2010 our electricity consumption would be 194TWh. From that you can calculate what area of sun collection or wind turbines you need. I have all the necessary figures to do that. But to be an alternative you must have way of storing large scale power. Solar for instance give about 5 hours of useful generation so what do you do for the other 19?
The only possible solution would be to pump water into a dam and then generate hydroelectric power from that. I have the formula P = hrgk for calculating what would be needed except for the efficiency factor k which varies from 0 to 1.
So if anyone can provide further information please do so. Particularly that pesky k and would there be a better way to store electricity, also is 194TWh reasonable.
I have calculated a 1GW power station using solar and came up with a figure that was huge. So huge I will try again I must have made a mistake. It is worthwhile to try because the scale of engineering to satisfy current consumption worth knowing.
When France has supplied its citizens as well as neighbouring countries with cheap, dependable, plentiful, CO2-free electricity for the last 20 years with no subsidies required from those citizens the conclusion to draw would be that we should be able to do likewise with our supply of fissile material that will last for “many centuries”.
DHMO,
Wouldn’t pumping water into a dam to make hydro be like feeding murcury to a duck and then sticking its beak up its bum to make perpetual motion?
Sorry DHMO, I wasn’t paying attention. Yes that would be as good a way of storing excess wind or solar power as any I have come across. Certainly better than boiling salt and once it is at an altitude it is not quickly dissipated. Also it could be used for other purposes.
Can’t help you on the calculations however I basically consider that hectares of PV cells or solar thermal collectors are a flawed concept in so many ways.
Spangled Drongo forget Hectares. More 100s of square kilometres. The absolute maximum is 203 watts per square metre current technology captured 90 watts. My expectation is there is not enough water but is there any other solution. I think alternative will be another way of spelling poverty. One of the writers here reckoned wind is competitive this was with subsidy and an artifical tax. The consumer pays for this as well as a large increase in price! Also consider that if you take our consumption each of us 27KWh per day. That is a family of 4 uses 108KWh.
Ausra.com are claiming they will fire up a new solar thermal power station that operates 24/7. They intend to store the heat and release it to the generators over the 19 hours of no sun.
I have heard them claim they will produce power cheaper than coal using this method.
Jabba says “All these loony wind power schemes fall by the wayside when the subsidies are removed.”
They can’t fall by the wayside in NSW because when our unwanted Desalination Plant comes on line, the NSW government has promised that it will be powered by Wind Power even though we don’t have enough Wind (excluding the govt) to power it.
Talk is cheap, Janama. Let’s see them actually deliver. Looking at their website the whole thing cries scam to me. “zero carbon” electricity. Really? What about the manufacturing cost in carbon? The land use and alienation of that land from other use? Direct heating of water. That will work IF the water is highly purified but even then there are some problems with heating the water directly. An insulating layer of steam tends to form which makes the heat transfer problematical. There are some ways around this some more convincing than others. Desert locations. So where do you get the water to keep the collectors clean? Note there seems to be no mention of exactly how they will store the heat for up to 20 hours. So what happens when we get a rain bearing depression and there’s little sun for days? At least the collectors will get cleaned but no electricity!
I think they are just tax farmers. Note the California location where they can scam Arnie.
As for windmills I’d like to know how the recycling of the carbon fibre/epoxy blades will go. There is a fatigue life on these. Just another green scam.
Anyone REALLY serious about CO2 emissions should be pushing fission technology as hard as possible. The CO2 thing is nonsense but there are lots of other advantages to nuclear mainly very low environmental impact due to the concentrated nature of the energy source and reliability of supply.
I don’t disagree with any of your points Eyrie, but it’s the only large scale project on the cards so far. Spain has just launched a new solar tower project but yet again it’s only 20MW which is nothing in todays production scales.
NSW alone produces 11.5GW of which 3.7GW is from the Snowy. To produce the 7.7GW currently provided by coal we would need to install 2,157 3.6MW wind turbines covering an area of around 1000 sq kilometers.
The largest wind farm in Australia is the Canunda Wind Farm, Lake Bonney, Sth Australia and it produces 206MW.
DHMO,
Been thinking about calculating the efficiency of the perched dam to store excess solar and wind:
If Y water falling from Z altitude produces X watts [should be known] and it takes X+a watts to raise Y water to Z altitude, then a expressed as a % of X+a would be the gross energy loss for storage.
I went on student exchange in the late 1990s to a family about 45 mins outside of San Francisco. My host-father, Jack, explained as we drove past fields full of wind towers with propellers that weren’t moving, that there are ball-bearings that keep the propellers moving and these need to be constantly replaced. If the ball-bearings are not replaced, the propeller becomes fixed in place.
In California, the Government initially offered a tax subside to encourage people to switch to ‘green energy’. Once the tax subsidy was removed, people went back to using traditional power supplies.
Slim, comments about tone are patronising when the whole tenor of the AGW debate from the pro-crowd has been censorious, divisive and threatening. It is also disingenuous to assert that the pro-sustainable/renewable energy view is not based on an ideology which is antipathetic towards capitalism; try reading loons like Clive hamilton, his “Growth Fetish” sums it up; ot Prof ‘Gus’ Speth who wants pro-AGW people to tear down the capitlistic ediface and get rid of corporatism and reinvent ‘democracy’, and so on and so forth. As to renewables. Germany is held up as the shining example; I gave you some stats about Germany’s energy sources before; here is a pie chart to make it a bit easier; the message from this is that nuclear, notably mini-nukes and thorium, is the way to go; with cars and transport I note that germany is doing its bit with the new BMW M3 more fuel economic than the Prius;
http://www.erneverbare-energien.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2007_en_pdf.pdf
The pie is on p.3
Curse the url;
http://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2007_en_pdf.pdf
spangled drongo yes I know that a cubic metre of water with a head of 100m produces .272watts. Which doesn’t get me very far. AUSRA.com does not provide info about their magical storage method. I gets me that detailed information about the cheap easy alternatives is very hard to come by. You would think the end is nigh people would be beating a path to our door explaining completely how it is to be done. But solutions who needs them seems not the new religion. Just raise costs Gaia will provide ahmen.
The head of Ausra is an aussie Dr. David Mills who developed his technique at the Hunter Valley power stations and Sydney University. He’s responsible for the design used by 60% of solar hot water systems.
He couldn’t get funding so he took it to the US – one his backers is Vinod Khosla, founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems. An impressive leadership team has been organised over the past year, http://www.ausra.com/about/leadership.html
DHMO,
I cubic metre weighs one tonne and I would reckon that it would take a few watts to get it 100 metres skywards.
You sure .272’s all it produces?
Seems like a potentially big loss.
Renewables look worse the more you study them.
Energy is like a river; it exists in two ways: flows and stores.
When you store energy, you create a dam to capture it.
What environmentalists call “renewable energy” is really just the stored energy of the sun.
In actuality, though, there’s no such thing as “renewable energy”: all energy, even the sun, is limited.
Fossil fuels are energy stores as well – specifically, they are stored solar energy, a process that takes millions of years – and they are highly concentrated, ten times more so than, for instance, wood.
In terms of wind and raw solar energy, the flow is exceptionally diluted: solar is 10 to 50 times less concentrated than fossil fuel. When you can’t concentrate it, then, the only way to harvest it is to use more and more land. That’s the limiting factor for both sun and wind energy.
T. Boone Pickens’s now-infamous plan would require 1,200 square miles for a single power plant.
Compare that to nuclear, which would require only one square mile.
Coal is extraordinarily abundant – we’ll never run out – and pound-for-pound contains twice as much energy as wood. Coal is a concentrated storehouse of energy.
Octane molecules in gasoline, however, are even more concentrated. In fact, they’re the densest store of carbon energy we’ve ever discovered. Pound-for-pound, gas possesses four times as much energy as coal. There’s a popular misconception today that gasoline is inefficient and wasteful. Nothing could be more inaccurate.
Gas molecules are not only by far the densest form of carbon energy we’ve ever discovered; they’re also easy to transfer because they’re fluid, which are two of the greatest reasons we’ve adopted gasoline.
Nuclear, on the other hand, is something else entirely. The public hasn’t even begun to grasp nuclear energy.
Fact: A palmful of uranium contains more energy than 100 boxcars full of coal.
Fact: Consumption of energy creates more energy, not less.
Fact: Despite years of government subsidies (regulators in the U.S., for instance, have forced utility companies to buy “renewables”), these same renewables generate only about 0.9 percent of our total electricity.
Fact: The most efficient solar panels currently in use (on the space station) are costly, and their conversion efficiency is about 20 percent, which is not very much.
Fact: Twelve miles of solar reflectors generate about 300 megawatts, a miniscule amount. Furthermore, those reflectors must be kept squeaky clean, maintained to the hilt, or they won’t work.
Fact: At our current level of technology, no conceivable mix of solar, wind, or wave can meet even half the demand for energy.
If, however, wind, wave, and solar are to become more efficient, it is only science and technology – as opposed to environmentalism’s plan of blasting us back into the Dark Ages – that will get them there.
Fact: We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use it. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity.
The more we use of it, therefore, the better we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more we use of a resource, the more of it we’re able to find.
This will sound counterintuitive, but only at first: then you glimpse its awesome logic. The entire history of resource use and extraction has followed this pattern without deviation.
Boone Pickens, Al Gore, Barack Obama, and many, many others are all calling for massive subsidization of the wind power industry.
As with ethanol and recycling and a host of other issues, you must ask yourself again: if these things are so efficient, why do they need to be subsidized?
Answer: they’re not so efficient.
Energies that require massive subsidization benefit absolutely no one; the only reason they need to be subsidized is that they cannot compete on the open market.
That fact alone tells you everything you need to know about them: they’re simply not good enough yet.
When they are, the free market will adopt them naturally, provided the government does not cave to special interest groups, which is exactly what’s happened with nuclear in the United States.
The reason wind power still won’t get us very far is that transmitting this power is such a huge difficulty.
Wind, as mentioned in both the article and the comments above, is also unpredictable; it’s therefore hard to integrate into an electrical grid, since grids have to maintain a voltage balance, or you’ll get brownouts, blackouts, and power surges that destroy equipment by the ton.
“The Grid,” incidentally, refers to the entire energy infrastructure. It even includes the electrical wires that go into your house.
Grid operators spend their whole lives trying to balance supply and demand on the grid.
Energy demand changes all throughout the day, all throughout the year. In summer, for instance, demand is higher. Late at night, demand is lower.
Grid operators balance all this.
Factor in the wind, which you cannot predict more than, at most, five hours in advance, and try pulling all that wind power into a grid, and you’ll begin to see how impossible the task is.
Wind needs constant backup.
“Spinning reserve” on an electrical grid refers to the amount of back-up power that is sitting there, waiting to go at a moment’s notice in case something goes wrong.
In general, 20 percent extra power is the standard spinning reserve on the grid.
Wind can indeed supplement a grid with this needed 20 percent spinning reserve, but it cannot come close to replacing fossil fuel.
Here’s what you don’t see in the fine print:
The vast majority of wind energy needs to be transmitted. Thus, you’ll need to step up voltage to 745 kilovolts (which is a lot) so that wind doesn’t lose all its energy in the transmitting process.
That infrastructure alone – forget the actual windfarms – will cost billions.
We’ll also have windmills covering the entire great plains. Quoting energy expert William Tucker:
“If Boone Pickens dream is realized, you’ll be able to drive from Texas to North Dakota without ever being out of sight of a windmill, just as in Denmark.”
That is, except for Boone Pickens’s backyard.
Said Pickens: “I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch: they’re ugly.”
Indeed.
And that, in part, is why people are already objecting.
Windmills are taller than the Statue of Liberty, and they’re loud; the Audubon Society calls them “condor Cuisinarts.”
Wind comes strongest along mountain crests. Thus the Blue Ridge Mountain, the Adirondacks, the Appalachians, and so on, would all have their ridges lined with these monstrosities. Yet enviros object to the building of one small nuclear plant, which compared with a windfarm is tiny.
Uranium generates gigantic amounts of energy in a very small space which wind and solar combined cannot come close to. Those who say otherwise – those who are anti-nuclear, in other words – have brought the world 400 million more tons of coal used per year, because for thirty years now, since 1979, following the Three Mile Island accident, we’ve been using more coal.
The meltdown of the uranium core in 1979 at Three Mile Island was so overblown by anti-nuclear groups that it went virtually unnoticed how the containment vessel at Three Mile Island had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity.
Uranium is abundant, clean, and safe – in technological societies.
The catastrophe at Chernobyl, which once again sent greens groups worldwide scurrying to their soapboxes, only happened because that state-run reactor was astonishingly unsafe: in the words of Peter Huber, “You couldn’t have operated a toaster oven out of it.”
Few scientists disagree that the discovery of energy at the nucleus of the atom is the greatest scientific feat of the 20th century. All this talk about how we need to “discover a new form of energy” therefore misses the point: we’ve already done so. It’s called nuclear energy. And it’s amazing.
We discovered that the concentration of energy in the nucleus of the atom is 2 million times as great as energy in the shell of an atom.
Fact: there are tiny amounts of uranium residue in coal; those trace residuals have more energy potential than all the coal itself.
Chemical energy, which is everything from wood to crude oil to gasoline to coal, consists of playing with the electrons, changing their energy state.
With nuclear, however, the big discovery was that there’s far more energy in the nucleus of the atom. Therefore, it produces a far, far smaller “footprint.”
In fact, there’s really no such thing as “nuclear waste”: a nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.
In other words, almost all “waste” can be recycled. Indeed, 95 percent of a spent nuclear fuel rod is natural uranium, and so it can be put right back in the ground, just as it was found.
The radioactive part constitutes only about 5 percent, but of that, half is uranium and plutonium, and so it can be recycled as fuel – specifically mixed oxide fuel, which is exactly what the French have been doing for 25 years now.
After 25 years, the French store all their so-called waste in one room, under La Hague, which is about the size of a basketball gymnasium.
Why haven’t you heard this? A writer for the New Yorker magazine named John McPhee in 1974 published a highly influential book called The Curve of Blinding Energy which convinced President Jimmy Carter (et al) that people could steal used plutonium from nuclear plants and makes bombs with it. But this is untrue.
Nevertheless, solely on the basis of this detrimental misinformation, the U.S. now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.
The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product – and all for absolutely no good reason.
That is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.
Nuclear “waste” is also used for medical isotopes. Over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own. This is not only truly profligate; it’s a kind of lunacy.
We’re the only country in the world that doesn’t reuse its nuclear by-products.
Nuclear energy is the cleanest, most efficient energy we have – by light years. Anyone who tells you differently, is flat-out wrong.
Thinking Man stop confusing their tiny minds with thoughts like those. How’s this this for a conspiracy theory. Greenpeace is in the pay of big nuclear, they know the alternatives are bloody useless and that the end game has to be nuclear!
Louis,
Further info re. strange alternative energy generators, look up “Lester Hendershot”
Thinking Man; great post; I wonder where that poseur, Slim, went?
Very, very interesting post “thinking man”, thankyou.
“T. Boone Pickens’s now-infamous plan would require 1,200 square miles for a single power plant.
Compare that to nuclear, which would require only one square mile.”
Wind power is the least land intensive form of energy – you can farm around and up to the base of the turbines, and it doesn’t require much in the way of mines to dig stuff out of the ground – i’d wager the average australian uranium mine is a lot bigger than one square mile, esp when you include the land around the mine that is off limits.
And nuclear has been getting hefty subsidies for a hell of a lot longer than renewables. If half the funding that had been devoted to nuclear research was spent on solar and wind, they’d be even cheaper.
Nuclear is about the same price as wind energy but after a longer development time frame – so if you want to talk disparagingly about wind power because it requires subsidies,you need to apply the same logic to nuclear power.
On grid issues: the advantage of wind power is that it is modular – when you go out and build a 2GW nuclear power station, it will be spending most of its early life idling – you dont think consumer load is constant do you? It goes up and down from day to night, and season to season – this is the disadvantage of baseload power stations that you never hear about, and it is one factor that adds to the cost of nuclear – you need to build it big, but it sits there idle a lot of the time as a result, as do many australian coal power stations.
The fact that an electricity grid has large amounts of reserve capacity and idling power stations means that you can increase the penetration of an intermittent power source like wind or solar on the grid up to a certain point without it having a big impact on the rest of the grid, and without it needing additional spinning reserve. I’ve seen various figures for what than number is, ranging from 10 to 20%. Nobody is arguing that wind can easily do 100% of our power needs, but even 10% is a great starting reduction in emissions.
The stuff you wrote about stepping up voltage etc was nonsense – all power stations incur transmission connection costs, and – at least in australia – have to pay for any new transmission infrastructure required to connect them to the grid. This is factored into the price, and as i’ve already pointed out, wind is competitive with nuclear power. Wind power doesn’t need 745kV. In australia, we have 66kV, 132kV, 330kV, 500kV, and a couple of others, but 500kV is the biggest. Wind farms are typically connected at 66 or 132kV for smaller farms, and 330kV for bigger ones.
Noise – the noise drops down once you are a few hundred metres away. For this reason, wind turbines are not suitable for urban or built up environments obviously. Funnily enough, you tend to see them in farming paddocks, where the noise is unlikely to bother many people at all, especially if placement of turbines is well regulated,as it is in Australia. If you’ve never heard a wind turbine, the sound isn’t mechanical – its like a swishing sound, that tends to get masked once the wind picks up, which is the only time that the turbines are operating?????
There is also apparently a lower frequency whoomp as the blades go past the tower, which i didn’t hear the few times i’ve visited a wind farm – maybe it depends on wind direction, and where you are standing etc.
I’m not against nuclear, unlike some environmentalists, and would be happy to see it – at least in principle – permitted in Australia.
However, i say again. Its one thing to technically allow it, and it is another thing for nuclear to compete.
1. its too expensive to compete with cheap australian coal so, like wind, will require subsidies
2. it will (regardless of whether or not it should) freak people out who live nearby, a problem that wind power also grapples with, though i’d hazard a guess to a much lesser extent. So nuclear developers will have to run the gauntlet of public opinion, and the development approval process to try and find a suitable site, which – as it does for wind power – will add to the cost.
3. nuclear developers will need to pay for any transmission infrastructure they need (which might be considerable if point #2 requires them to site the plant far away)
I guarantee you, and i said it before: nuclear wont happen in australia without massive subsidies and a favourable (not simply neutral) government. The government will need to placate people, and smooth over the development approval process, and just force it on people in some location. If the government allows it just that and doesn’t nanny-state it through, i can’t see how nuclear would succeed.
Steve you make some valid points. Nuclear is not likely to succeed in oz because coal is so cheap. But if we really do need to cut co2 emissions, nuclear is currently the only way it can be done. You simply can not get enough wind or solar energy to run the required base load with current technology. if we do get 10% wind power for the ‘grid” we still need the other 90%.
When Nuclear power is given due consideration as a means to cut co2, then we can start to worry that AGW is real….until then only a fool would not be at least a little sceptical.
One of the largest solar installations in the US is scheduled to be built here in California’s desert. It would have provided a real percentage of our power use.
BUT
the enviros sued to stop the transmission lines from being built that would have sent the power to the large urban centers.
They are also suing to stop drilling NEXT TO park land cause it will DESTROY THE VIEW!!!!!
DUUUUHHHH!!!!!!
No, it isn’t really about clean energy and reducing CO2. It is about returning us to the stone age without the use of stones!!!!
Marcus,
thanks for that reference to Lester Hendershot – never heard of him. Had a quick look at his circuit diagram and might throw it to an electrical engineer I know.
Some of the comments here remind me of Queen Victoria’s era before oil was discovered – wind power – the Dutch were using it for a long time and seem not to have felt any need to adapt it to the 21st Century.
It is worth thinking about the fact that the largest oil companies are government owned – controlling 96% of the world’s oil.
Two points:- (1) Existing Wind Turbines are poorly designed and badly sited. (2) Who thinks that it is funny pumping a yearly dose of 3 billion tonne of shit into the air that we breath. Why not bring back leaded petrol, CFCs, DDT and Atomic bombs, that way the whole thing would be completely full of shit.