I was in a conversation today at lunch with a fellow who told me that “wind power is better than anything we’ve ever done for generating electricity”. That made me wonder, how reliable (beyond the constancy of wind issues) is it?
Whenever I drive through Techachapi or Altamont passes here in California I note that there always seems to be a fair number of these three blade windmills that are out of commission. Perhaps failure is more common than one would expect. I found a couple of examples:
And this one also, though I don’t know what the ending for it was like the one above…
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
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Dee-
The statement was and is clear:
pictures of broken machinery is not an argument for or against anything. They are only pictures of broken machinery.
A picture of a broken pump jack would be just a picture of a broken pump jack, not an argument for or against oil as an energy source.
A picture of a ripped sail on a sailboat would not be an argument for or against wind as a power source.
A picture of a broken turbine would not be an argument for or against the generation of electricity with them.
Broken machinery or equipment is just that, broken machinery or equipment.
@batguano:
I agree and I don’t think the accompanying article tried to make the two examples in to a trend either.
@batguano:
Of course one single picture isn’t a proof, but how about a spreadsheet
going back all the way to 2002, showing monthly output for most
swedish windmills. If monthly output varies like this, what would it
look like for hourly output?
wind stat
@The Engineer
Most Americans are pro renewable energy, pro nuclear, and pro coal.
There are some very vocal Americans that are anti nuke,anti coal, anti wind or anti whatever. Sometimes for good reasons but mostly out of ignorance.
I am an engineer in the electricity generating industry. I am pro having an adequate energy supply. I have supported building windmills in dry land wheat fields. However, the basic problem with wind and solar is not a very good way to make electricity. Think of wind and solar as a modern metal art form.
Since ‘The Engineer’ is from Denmark, maybe he can explain why Denmark has stopped building wind.
a couple of things: (1) more than several wind farms have no transmission connection to the grid. Bringing wind online isn’t just a matter of getting them sited, there are no existing transmission right-of-winds to connect them. Opposition to land seizure for transmission is a tremendous national problem. 85% of wind generation proposals in the planning queue’s in regional transmission operators nationwide, have no transmission plan. Perception that wind is going to supply 20% of capacity in our national electric consumption by 2025 is perception, the reality is far from that. But wind’s priority is behind another transmission priority. Upgrading the existing grid with additional high-voltage transmission is reliability issue and is seriously lagging because of this opposition. Proponents of land-rights and environmental reasons are highly mobilized. In the end, all of it will get done, as the opposition is merely doubling the processing time and overall costs.
(2) there is a generation of wind turbine blades out there, which were constructed with faulty engineering standards. The carbine blade material somehow wasn’t designed properly. Also many of the 1st generation turbines that have been produces over that last 5-7 years, are have poor operating reliability. There’s a few Indian companies involved and its primarily due to the rush of turbine orders which overwhelmed the industry’s proven leaders. Hence the market opened up for newer and less proven producers to gain a footing in the market. The rush to “go green” by countries and states RPS initiatives created the need. Going forward, we’ll see those problems abate and existing problem turbines replaced.
(3) the intermittency of renewable power without a more intelligent grid, is a headwind towards their effective built-out. Like transmission an intelligent “SmartGrid” is required and will take a decade or two to be completed. With a more intelligent grid, the intermittency of renewables like wind can be smoothed with digitally automated system controls, utilizing gas-fired backup and demand response capacity. This is why T. Boone Pickens plan to take gas generated electricity and moving it to the transportation sector and replace it with wind, is complete bonk. If you have noticed, Chesepeake Energy’s CEO new television commercial acknowledges Boone’s notion of greater natural gas, but only in the transportation sector, not in eliminating it from our grid generation capacity. In fact, gas-generated electricity will expand from its current ~20% of all national capacity to 25-30% by 2030.
But the greater point on the topic of energy, is that EVERYTHING needs to be on the table – renewables, fossil, nuclear, smart grid, efficiencies & conservation, R&D. The gov’t can point the way with incentives but a fed gov’t Apollo project is not a viable market solution here. It is vital to understand the energy challenges and with that understanding, it is clear that expanding domestic oil production, wherever it is, is an absolute necessity to get the nation from where we are today, to the year 2030. The left just heard it from Obama last night. Perhaps by the year 2030, we can honestly say the U.S. can cease “expanding” her petroleum production capacities. But until that time, the bridge today to an cleaner energy consuming economy requires oil and coal w/o question.
Haken- So the Swedish wind farms are showing an 11.7% availability? That’s pretty bad.
By 2030, less than 10-15% of electricity generation in the US will be from natural gas. This prediction assumes that the nuke plants with COL application under review get built. Natural gas fired plants provide cheap reserve capacity. As we use less natural gas, the price of natural will decrease.
As floodguy suggests, the share of wind will be small and difficult to predict. Reliability and maintenance costs of 10 year old wind turbines is not known. I would further predict a trend that state RPS qualify nukes as renewable energy. A running nuke reduces ghg from a natural gas fired plants much better than a broken windmill.
Karl Heuer- I agree with your calculations on solar PV that you posted above. The 6 hours sun/day is for the best solar resources region in the US. Here in sunny Florida, the number is closer to 5 kWhr/m^2/day. The Northeast and Northwest are considerably lower.
Anyways, the issue with solar PV has always been cost. Panel prices this week average $4.85/W(peak) in the US. An installed system runs $8 – $9/Watt(peak). Unless you charge extortion rates for electricity and shower consumers with rebates (sounds like this is the situation in CA), solar PV doesn’t pay.
Response to Smokey 19:11:26
I served on a nuclear submarine (USS James K. Polk, SSBN 645) for 3 years in the 1960’s, and I don’t glow in the dark. In fact, a person outside in the sun gets far more radiation than a person gets on a nuclear sub. I wore a radiation badge that was monitored monthly for possible exposure, and I never recorded any. Once in a while, I would even go into the reactor room and look through the lead glass at the reactor. In my humble opinion, if this country doesn’t go more nuclear soon, we are going to suffer mightily. People will feel differently when the blackouts and brownouts begin, due to lack of real, consistent generation capability.
floodguy (06:42:23) :
Us pesky Libertarians consider the Supreme Court’s support of Eminent Domain a tremendous national problem. (Actually, their decision let the states’ law have sway, but a lot of states didn’t have very strong laws.) Here in NH, people proposed seizing Justice Souter’s property for economic development, i.e. to build the “Lost Liberty Hotel” and its restaurant “Just Desserts”.
@Ron – nuclear
Two important aspects to nuclear are cost/payback and social abuse.
The investments in nuclear plants have been highly manipulated debt games in banks and did not payback the investment reasonably.
The social abuse is concentrating control over energy in a pyramid which can then be used to hold a population hostage.
Power sources that can be built in various sizes by the population, business, industry, and investors spread control widely,
with legislation that gives all power producers the automatic right to sell into the grid.
Spreading involvement stabilizes the market, preventing abuse- holding entire regions or nations hostage with energy.
Anything but nuclear, because of the huge investment and potential for financial abuse, is better to develop.
Something some of you may not have thought of when considering home solar/wind payback.
current price of gasoline is $4/gal that equals $.1190/KWh (33.6KWh/gal gasoline)
But — electric vehicles are (at least) 3 times as efficient as Internal Combustion vehicles — most IC engines are less tha 30% efficient even a crap electric motor is better than 90%
So for every KWh you use to charge your vehicles, you are effectively getting
36 cents/KWh at todays cost of gas
If we analyzed it on a per panel basis
Evergreen solar 195W panel @ur momisugly $8/W Installed that = $1560
@ur momisugly1.49m^2 * 5KWh incident/day* 12% conversion efficiency = .9KWh/day
= $328/year
Payback break even in less than 5 years assuming gas does not increase.
This does not count any subsidies or tax credits, it even excludes the mortgage interest deduction if you took out a loan to improve the home.
You folks are using rational logic and math to discuss alternative energy… wrong venue.
Wind mills,Priuses and solar panels are about religion, not economics and as such are immune to logic.
They are the totems of the new green god of Gaia.
And the green gods and their self-chosen priests (e.g. saint Gore) will tolerate no other beliefs before them.
Greens are unswayed by reality and instead bound by the dogma of their false god.
We could be seeing the end of the age of reason and the emergence of a new dark age driven by dogma… this time, literally dark.
One of the more interesting ‘success’ indicators for wind energy here in the UK is that, unlike Sweden it seems, the information about real generated output is not, so far as I know, readily available. Indeed one might say it is deeply buried. Last time I tried to find it I had to attempt to extract things from the ROC (Renewables Obligation Certificates) records and that was neither simple nor especially useful.
I admit that I am reading between the lines BUT I would have expected success to be shouted from the rooftops incessantly …
As I recall the large off-shore windfarm in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales (jointly developed by a large German power company and Greenpeace and sold on to a Middle Eastern investment group within 2 years I seem to remember) was one of the more successful installations some 18 months to 2 years after commissioning and was in some months claiming ROC credits at a rate suggesting around 34% of plated capacity rating being delivered. But most months seemed to be less than that. It has now been in place for about 4 years so I guess maintenance must be kicking in. Time to re-check perhaps.
Meantime you might find some of the pages here of interest
http://www.habitat21.co.uk/
especially this one if anyone is considering erecting their own power generation device.
http://www.habitat21.co.uk/wind30.html
Karl H:
“This does not count any subsidies or tax credits…”
So the gov’t takes our taxes, runs them through an expensive bureaucracy, then rebates what’s left as tax credits to windmill operators — while the average taxpayer pays for it all.
There’s a word for this: “scam”.
If windmills are so great, they should be able to stand on their own, without any tax advantage. Explain why windmills need a tax credit, as they sit 90% idle in the windy Altamont Pass.
Altamont turbines get no subsidy, they are over 25 years old — many don’t even have an owner because the companies that originally erected them in the 1970’s no longer exist.
You could search on “paul Gipe” he has a website detailing the derelict turbines in tehachapi and altamont
You still have not addressed the solar for electric vehicles and how quickly that pays back
Hey, I’m wildly in favor of whatever works, pays, requires no subsidy or coercive legislation.
And abides by the morals laws, I suppose . . .
(But it has to do all that first.)
I’d venture to guess that the vast majority present feel that way.
Oil companies don’t need tax credits either, but they still get them.
“Oil companies don’t need tax credits either, but they still get them.”
But oil companies work — unlike most of the Altamont windmills. And a tax deduction is a lot different than a tax credit. Oil companies get routine tax deductions, not credits.
Jeff A.-
If Nuclear is so viable, why hasn’t the nuclar industry built more plants
WITH all the subsidies they get like:
Loan Guarantees
Subsidized Industry Insurance and Liability limitations specific to the Nuclear Industry
49% of the Federal energy R&D Budget over the last 50 years
Cost of waste treatment and storage covered by Non-Proliferation $
Cost of Fuel Enrichment subsidized because until 1993 DOE produced all enriched fuel, and after 1993 USEC a government corporation (taxpayer funded) enriches all fuel
Argonne Labs – again the taxpayers – separated spent fuel
And then there is the giant handout of Yucca Mountain:
The turbine that caught fire in the photo — the utility has to bear the costs of waste disposal and storage
In the chemical industry there is cradle to grave
For the nuclear industry, THE US GOVT is footing the bill for disposal and storage, and has been for decades
Subsidies and direct government spending (loan guarantees, liability limits, tax credits, R&D, fuel production, waste storage, etc.) for the nuclear industry dwarf any subsidies for renewables
Excellent program this morning on PBS: Scotching the Wind
Wind power can certainly have its drawbacks. Some 100 miles of access roads would have needed to have been built, destroying much of the peat land, and the locals’ way of life.
The rationale for the wind farm, “carbon reduction” is of course completely bogus.
Travelling through northern France last week we saw a small windfarm with the blades turning a way that can most politely be described as “desultory”! Each unit had a flashing light on top, presumably to warn aircraft.
We got to thinking, maybe at that speed all they were doing was generating enough energy to power their little lights.
There are a few Wind Farms which have real-time streaming webcams which are publicly accessible. There is also one pay-for-view wind farm webcam but I will not facilitate the gullible being separated from their money. I was frankly surprised at how small the number webcams actually are but given how little movement can be observed at some wind turbines, perhaps the lack of webcams is not that surprising. There is also some still frame webcams which may or may not be updated regularly, which I did not document here.
Here is New Jersey’s first and I hope last wind farm.
Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm
http://www.njwind.com/project.html
The two turbines on the left and bottom in above photograph are the ones seen in the following webcam which is looking east towards Atlantic City.
Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm Webcam
http://www.njwind.com/webcam.html
Google Earth: Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm (39.3819°, -74.4481°)
You can check wind speeds here.
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=Atlantic+City%2C+NJ
The turbines are not always in operation, even when there is wind. When there not much activity at the wind farm, the nighttime light show at Atlantic City is worth the viewing. I wonder what the carbon footprint is for just the light show? Someone forgot to set the webcam clock, it must be a Jersey thing.
The City of Bowling Green, Ohio Wind Farm
Bowling Green, Ohio Wind Farm Turbins
http://www.bgohio.org/utility-director/turbines.html
Bowling Green, Ohio Wind Farm Webcam
http://www.bgohio.org/utility-director/webcam.html
You can check wind speeds here.
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=Bowling+Green%2C+OH
Google Earth: Route 6W and Tontogany Rd., Bowling Green, OH (41.377°, -83.7376°)
The four turbines are just north of the intersection along Tontogany Rd. and south of W. Poe Rd. The webcam clock is accurate and all four turbans appear to be in constant operation even at low wind speeds. The webcam goes through a series of programmed pans and zooms which repeats every 7 minutes.
Here is the Zephyr Corporate website in Japan which links to may locations with their wind turbines around the world. Some of the webcams, when they are working, allow you to take remote control of the camera, which is a lot of fun.
Zephyr Corporate Wind Turbine Webcams with Real-time remote control.
http://www.zephyreco.co.jp/en/main_live.htm
Using Google Earth I looked at the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm and the Altamont Pass Wind Farm; I was frankly surprised at the amount of environmental damage which can be observed from an arrival view of both locations. If these had been an oil field or logging operation we would be hearing about it. To see the full impact, zoom out from the following points.
Google Earth: Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm (35.0476°, -118.266°)
Google Earth: Altamont Pass Wind Farm (37.7324°, -121.652°)
I did a search for any webcams at either California wind farm location and was unable to locate any. If anyone has a real-time streaming webcam at either location please post the information.
The good people of California should demand that all wind farms have webcams so that they can see Mother Earth is being saved in real-time. If there are any public spirited citizens with a view of either wind farm and a high speed Internet access, consider setting up a public webcam. For additional information see these Wikipedia pages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass_Wind_Farm
Mike
Karl- In response to your interesting posting on powering your electric vehicle using a home-based solar PV system-
Here is my comparison of cost-of-ownership for two solar PV powered EV’s and two gasoline powered ICE’s. The assumptions are generous to the solar PV electric solution.
Assumptions include-
-need a vehicle
-require local transportation, no restrictions on cargo, towing, seating, style, flair…
-all electric power for the EV is provided by the solar PV system at home (no fill-ups at work, no long trips).
-10 year vehicle life.
-solar PV with battery backup to provide recharge any time of day or night.
-solar PV array sized to meet daily energy needs of vehicle, in location with 5 hours/day sun (Florida), at $8.85/W(p) installed.
-$22,500 rebate on solar PV system (Florida).
-EVs are the $109K Tesla roadster and the $40K Chevy volt (both ‘almost ready’).
-Gasoline vehicles are the $14K Honda Civic and $30K Ford Flex.
-All payments are from cash on-hand, no financing charges, no lost opportunity penalty
-40 miles/day, every day, approx 15,000 miles/year
-2% maintenance on ICE’s, Volt, 1% on Tesla
-Chevy Volt runs on solar PV electricity only, no gasoline used
-EV batteries need replacing at 5 years at $10K(Tesla) or $5K(Volt)
-$4/gallon for gasoline
-trade-in value of zero
‘Fuel’ Energy used over 10 year life-
Tesla Roadster- 46,731 kWhr
Chevy volt- 57,726 kWhr
Honda Civic- 122,668 kWhr
Ford Flex- 223,033 kWhr
The total ownership cost for each option, including energy costs to run the vehicles-
Tesla Roadster- $155K
Chevy volt- $84.3K
Honda Civic- $34.2K
Ford Flex- $68.5K
To have the Honda Civic cost the same as the Tesla Roadster would require gas prices to average $37/gallon.
The Flex and the Volt are pretty close, which is encouraging.
This works a little better in the Southwest, and a lot worse in the Northeast or Northwest.
The solar PV idea looks good to me once we have access to less expensive all-electric vehicles.
I was surprised that the plug-in Prius is pricier than the Volt. With an additional battery pack (which voids the warranty) the Prius plug-in is about $60K, and gets about 30 miles of all-electric range.
Note that if you do not use all of the PV output each day, the price per kWhr goes up. You can add more battery storage to the solar PV system to collect more than one day’s worth of energy, but the price per kWhr goes up.
paminator,
thank you for the interest in the viewpoint I brought up
let me add a few comments
1. compare the tesla to a comparable IC car like an Acura NSX, Porche 911, etc. It does go 0-60 in 4 seconds after-all
2. The new battery packs are long-life Lithium Ion — They are good for 2000+ discharge-recharge cycles , my Samsung L-ion cell phone battery is over 4 years old, and has been recharged on average 1.5 times a day thats over 2000 charges, and it still lasts 90% of the initial talk time
That corresponds to 7 years at daily recharges