Guest post by Steven Goddard
The Telegraph has an article today about the latest addition to the UK wind energy grid, described as “Europe’s largest onshore wind farm at Whitelee.” The article says :
When the final array is connected to the grid later this week, there will be 140 turbines generating 322 megawatts of electricity. This is enough to power 180,000 homes.
Assuming the turbines are actually moving. The problem is that on the coldest days in winter, the air is still and the turbines don’t generate much (if any) electricity. Consider the week of February 4-10, 2009 in Glasgow.
The average temperature was -2C (29F) during the week, and there was almost no wind on most of those days. No wind means no electricity. On the coldest days, there is no wind – so wind power fails just when you need it the most. On the morning of February 4, the temperature was -7C (19F) and the wind speed was zero.
In order to keep society from lapsing into the dark ages, there has to be enough conventional (coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear) capacity to provide 100% of the power requirements on any given day. Thus it becomes apparent that Britain’s push for “renewable” energy is leading the UK towards major problems in the future.
The belief that conventional capacity can be fully replaced by wind or solar is simply mistaken and based on a flawed thought process. People want to believe in renewable energy, and that desire blocks them from thinking clearly. The people of Glasgow were fortunate in February that there was still still enough conventional capacity available to keep their lights on. As the UK’s plans to “convert” to “renewable energy” proceed, this will no longer be the case.
Wind and solar can reduce the average load over a year, but they can not reduce the base or peak requirements for conventional electricity.
In the future, weather forecasts may have to include a segment like “No electricity from Wednesday through Friday. Some electricity possible over the weekend.”
BTW – You can purchase those nice fluorescent green jackets at the Claymore Filling Station in Ballachulish for about £12. I’ve got one just like it in the closet.
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I was in one of these machines while operating. 850KW On what was a pretty calm evening, it was producing 160kw +/- 10kw Installed on a Collage campus in an urban area. Although it’s connected to the grid, the collage receives no revenue and therefore dumps that extra power. In spite of this, it’s expected to pay the 1.2 million euro installation cost in 7 years. That a year less then the original estimate.
The installation cost of one of these turbines (1MW) is about 1.5m euro. At 25% efficient and at retail electricity cost thats paid for in 4.5 years.
What does it cost to build a coal or gas fired plant and what does the fuel cost to run it?
This puts it all into perspective. It all boils down to money. http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/search?q=ovenden+moor
The wind blows like hell up here on top of the Llano, trouble is that it is not constant. Sometimes it blows 50 mph and sometimes it does not blow at all. I go North bound out of Amarillo and see all these monster wind farms and fewer than half of the things are even turning, even on a gusty day.
Politics, uhg… I like freemarkets better.
REPLY: I can vouch for that, I drove from Amarillo to Liberal, KS and back down into OK by Buffalo, OK for station USHCN surveys and saw many wind projects with blades idle. Gearboxes are the key- they don’t hold up. – Anthony
Holland is generating with windmills too and they utilize renewable materials in their construction. See for example this windfarm:
http://imageofholland.filternet.nl/Kinderdijk/kinderdijkframe.htm
Interesting that the UK has just started the worlds largest wind power project. Those interested can go:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/05/london-array-20090517.html#more
The plan is to get a gigawatt out of 90 square miles off the coast with roughly 1000 towers. Eleven towers per square mile.
Too bad they don’t give details of the increased government support which supposedly makes the project feasible. I am dubious about doing this for $3B for the first phase of 630MW. That just seems too low for such construction.
But maybe there is more money going into construction than the article mentions.
Wind power stats continue to baffle me. No cost ever seems exactly clear or honest. Estimates for expected turbine life seem to vary from days to centuries. And the actual power output – not capacity – even from existing sites is ferociously disputed.
With that in mind, it is a very good thing when others build. Facts will gradually settle the arguments.
>NoAstronomer (14:03:47) :
Echoing Paul James reply to Zeke Hausfather on electricity demand in winter … for several historical reasons many old towns in the UK and Europe do not have gas lines to residences. So electricity supplies the energy for a larger proportion of winter time heating in Europe than in the US.
Mike.<
MIke thanks for the reminder.
I had forgotten about off peak electric storage heaters. For those not familiar with them they contain large blocks of concrete like material that you heat up overnight using cheaper off peak electricity and then have them release the heat the next day. Which is wonderful if you can forecast your heating demand one full day in advance. Not so good if you can’t.
Then there’s always a one bar electric fire to fall back on I guess. Or failing that you could throw some more coal on the fire.
Oh the joys !
Green’s don’t care much about logic, I actually had this conversation:
Greenie – This house is run is run 100% on solar power, it’s for the poor you know, so they won’t be at the mercy of greedy power companies.
Me – Ah, good how will they get power at night?
Greenie – I just said it’s “SOLAR,” they’ll get it from the sun of course!
Every windmill added to the grid pushes electricity prices incrementally higher.
http://www.otherbrothersteve.com/?p=1173
Bill Marsh (12:14:46) :
George E. Smith,
Well, okay, let’s do some ‘back of the envelope’ calcs here.
Assuming
1) we use the above turbines to meet the 20% figure
2) generously assuming they supply 50% of rated capacity.
3) Acreage requirements for the turbines are as stated in the article.
Each turbine supplies 1.65 mwatts
Total electrical demand in the US in 2007 was 764,476 mwatts (US Dept of Energy)
then, to supply 20% of that need (not accounting for increase in demand) you’d need 92,664 turbines. Each turbine requires .15168 sq miles, so 92,664 turbines would require a land area of 14,055 square miles.
Okay, so the distance from the Canadian border to Mexico is roughly 4,000 miles, so you’d be able to put 26,666 windmills in one line from Canada to Mexico. Looks to me like (based on my assumptions) you’d need one line about halfway or a little more from the Canadian border to Mexico, say about halfway through Colorado?
If the turbines deliver 25% of rate capacity it would stretch from Canada to Mexico with another line stretching about 1/4 of the way.
Using Mr. Papsdorf’s numbers, that many turbines would generate 3.892 million tons of CO2 in manufacture and maintenance.
I would wonder how long it will take to manufacture 92,000 wind turbines, not to mention transportation and assembly? I don’t know what production capacity at Siemen’s is, but I suspect it would take them a number of years to build that many windturbines. I also wonder what % of the world’s steel/aluminum production would be devoted to this endeavor.
This is so brilliant.. had to repost but would also add the question that many turbines… and the the conversion of that much atmospheric energy/ convection to electric on such a scale… would by terms of absolute math/ physics.. directly and certainly change the global climate dynamics.. Some one here must have the mathmatical chops to have an idea of the totals.
1) Has Hyperion actually built any of these small nucs ? Their web site is full of hype, a bit short on fact.
2) Energy storage: The only idea that made any economic sense was to pump water up to a high lake at night and run it back down through generators during the day. The eco’s fought it tooth and nail.
We don’t have a good ‘battery’ of any kind. Invent one and the world will push an electric car to your door.
As for the photo: Maybe the blades are turning, they just used a really fast shutter setting?
“”” Bruce Foutch (13:29:22) :
RE: George E. Smith (13:09:31) :
“I drive over Vasco Rd to the delta to fish regularly, and we use those fans there to decide whether to go home or not. When the fans are turned on; they generate a lot of wind over Frank’s Tract; and since it is very shallow (8 ft) it builds up dangerous waves for small fishing boats.”
Sorry George, but I think you got your physics backward. Windmills are passive and can only remove energy from the wind. They do not create wind, as they are not turned on in the sense you imply. “””
Hey Bruce; if the fans are turned on, there is always a wind blowing; if they fans are turned off there is no wind blowing. pretty near 100% correlation; so it should be obvious to anyone that the fans are creating the wind.
Just ask AlGore; and he’ll whip a coupla graphs in front of you and say: “see don’t they look correlated to you? ”
Seems obvious to me; correlation equals causation!
George
Wansbeck (14:09:45)
Good point, can’t make a cup of tea in the dark on that.
Britannic,
I experienced some of that global warming drought on Lake Windermere last August. It poured rain the entire time we were on the boat.
The good news was that the lake wasn’t very crowded.
The bad news was that I hadn’t picked up the Ballachulish green jacket yet.
NoAstronomer- “Echoing Paul James reply to Zeke Hausfather on electricity demand in winter …”
As an additional data point on winter versus summer peaking of electricity use, Progress Energy in Florida (where I live) reports that it hits peak demand in the coldest months of the year, not the warmest. There is freezing weather in north and central florida, a lot of electric or heat pump heating systems, and little to no residential gas infrastructure.
Florida, fortunately, has not jumped head-first into wind turbine farms, seeing as it has some of the worst wind resources (Class 1 or 2) in the country. We are trying to build four new nuclear reactors. Time will tell if this ever happens.
Texas uses wind farm energy in day-ahead electric supply scheduling with an 8% of capacity rating. That is what they feel they can count on for day-ahead contracts. Those farms are in some of the best wind class regions in the country, and should theoretically be producing at 30 – 35% of capacity.
I think you mean Pink Floyd, James at psychedelic full tilt. This is the Island of Maui in Hawaii:
http://bushnell.homeip.net/~bill/pictures/transfer_to_maui.2007.04.25/fullsize/hawaii.2007.04_161.jpg
Elegant?
Bill Marsh (12:14:46) :” George E. Smith,
Well, okay, let’s do some ‘back of the envelope’ calcs here.
Assuming
1) we use the above turbines to meet the 20% figure
2) generously assuming they supply 50% of rated capacity.
3) Acreage requirements for the turbines are as stated in the article. ”
I don’t see any replacement cost or figures concerning down time after the spring tornados rip up a whole bunch of these turbines, as they most certainly will.
This is why conservationists have insisted on monitoring requirements being built into licensing of windfarms (along with more stringent siting, including surveys by competent field biologists).
Altamont should’ve been torn down IMO, there were lawsuits over it, I found out about the raptor deaths at that project from a guy who’d recently retired from being the USF&W refuge head for CA/NV.
Altamont is a “perfect storm” of bad design (derrick towers) and siting (raptors routinely move from the coast to the interior using the pass).
Monitoring of newer projects tell us, though, that no matter what you care to believe, bodies on the ground tell us that modern windfarms aren’t nearly as deadly to raptors as Altamont.
If you want to reduce raptor mortality at the hand of man to zero, you’re going to have to ban the automobile, airplane, tall buildings …
Phil (11:21:21) :
They survey sites for wind powered generators for at least 12 months prior to designating them as suitable.
Yes, they may do, but they survey the government subsidy much more closely, because without that, there is no profit.
something nobody mentioned is that back-up for wind farms cannot be a coal fired station; they are too slow to “throttle”, so the back-up is mostly done using turbogas generation plants. they are cheap, and incospicuous (thats why many european countries use them by the thousands) and fast to turn on and off, but inefficient expecially at part load, and use expensive fuels like natural gas.
the overall image is pretty grim. many countries dont build large, efficient and clean power stations because is not politically good, and revert to building small, ineffient power stations, and those useless toys called wind turbines. is really bad.
dhogza,
You said, “If you want to reduce raptor mortality at the hand of man to zero, you’re going to have to ban the automobile, airplane, tall buildings …” I am sure some of your friends have palns for exactly that.
The problem is that windmills do not do as advertised. They do not save nearly as much carbon as claimed, they make undependable power, they are completely dependent on tax payer subsidy, etc. And no matter how much lipstick AGW promoters put on windmills, they are still huge ugly clutter on the landscape.
Not every municipality in UK is so stupid. Read the short post of mine
“Renewable” Is Kinda Perpetuum Mobile
based on article from Guardian
Ministerial hectoring on green energy is fascism in the wind [>]
The Guardian, James Lovelock
Sunday 29 March 2009
Regards
It seems that neither the general public; nor the political class; nor even the venture capital investment class seem to get the fundamental hangup in “Renewable Green (clean) Energy.”
The sun supplies it at an average global equalized rate of 168 Watts per square metre on the Trenberth Scale.
At least with PEV solar, the energy output is about linear with the energy input; and since most solar cells are just Silicon diodes, the output Voltage is fairly constant at around 0.5 Volts (under optimum loading) over a wide range of input solar irradiance; well it changes about 26 milliVolts for a doubling of the solar flux, and output load current; or about 60mV per decade. So you get about a 12% Voltage change for a 10:1 change in solar irradiance; and that range of supply Voltage can easily be handled by even crude DC-AC inverter circuits.
By anybody’s standards, that is a pretty good situation; and actually the biggest problem might be designing the inverter circuits to operate over a 10:1 ratio of supply current.
Now contrast that with a wind turbine, where the available power goes as the cube of the wind speed; so you lose 87.5% of your generating capacity for a 2:1 reduction in wind speed; and you get an 8X overload for a doublng of design wind speed. Well there’s a 4X increase in the thrust on the tower; plus there’s a vertical wind shear gradient that any sailor can tell you about; so the fan blade close to the ground sees a lower wind speed than the blade going over the top; so theres a cyclic thrust problem that flexes the blade axially every rotation; creating a vibration that literally shakes the system to death. Well yes, you can ameliorate these problems with individually feathered blades; pretty much like a helicopter rotor has to do; but that is an additional mechanical complexity and wear and tear factor; that wind farms have to deal with.
And yes they are ugly as sin; just ask the Kennedy Compound denizens.
PEV solar arrays in urban or residential areas are relatively benign aesthetically. I like what Applied Materials is doing covering their employee parking lots with them. So they get auxilliary power, and the employees get a covered carport for their chariot.
But it still eats a lot of area since the PEV efficiency is roughly in the 15-20% range; so the electric output now averages more like 30W/m^2; with a peak of about 4-5 times that.
A plant to generate about the 205 of total electricity sought would cover only about 30,000 square miles or 19.2 million arcres; which just happens to be the exact size of the whole Arctic National wildlife Reserve.
So is it better to use maybe 2400 Acres of the ANWR arctic desert; that is visited by no-one; or the whole 19.2 million Acres of the Desert southwest that is home to millions of people, and visited by millions more; and which would certainly result in an unexpected change in the climate of the whole desert South western United States; if not the entire country.
Time to get real; renewable green energy is a good niche application auxilliary energy source; but it isn’t going to work for prime time; it is only barely superior to the fig trees we started with, and today there aren’t enough monkeys to gather figs for us at a fast enough clip; even if we had the fig trees.
George
Without any comments:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/speaking_truth_to_wind_power.html
And we,the people, pay the price for this madness at least five times.
1. We pay for the full costs of the wind mills.
2. We pay for the back-up capacity.
3. We pay for the CO2 tax.
1 – 3 is four times the current electricity bills.
4. We pay for the Government grands via the taxes we have to pay.
5. We have to look at ruined landscapes.
Any politician that believes that:
A. renewable energy can replace fossil fuel based energy!
B. Humankind can control weather and climate…
Is not worth your vote and belongs in a mental institution.
So wake up, call your representative and tell them you are looking forward to the next elections to vote them out of power if they support this “Green Madness”.
I work for a Florida electric utility.. and can verify with absolutness the point made by Chris y.
Our greatest demand is in winter… not summer, and my company is building a giant solar farm…. which will in our greatest demand have its least capacity… and I will add the additional point of clarity the such facilities( wind or solar) are indeed more significantly affected by adverse weather events( hurricanes, tornadoes) and as such can be rendered in effectual for significant lengths of time as a result.
take for instance the current canopy numbers expected in the next 5 days( overall cloud cover during sunlit hours) and any solar farm here in (sunny south Florida) would be effectively neutralized.