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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Right; my personal opinion counts for nothing. I remember being impressed with the wind farms near Spain’s Atlantic coast, dozens of graceful turbines turning languidly while cattle grazed beneath. But I can understand how some would not want pristine wilderness invaded by these huge instruments of technology. And my personal aesthetic does not mean that I agree with politicians spending taxpayer’s (= my) money on unnecessary projects that will just increase my electric bills.
If unsubsidized ‘alternative’ power systems could bring me electricity more cheaply than ‘traditional’ systems (including nuclear power), then I’m all for them. If not, then send them back to the drawing boards and let’s drill, mine, and burn.
The problem is, the public has been brainwashed into thinking that drilling, mining, and burning are evil. If you want to keep the “petty bureaucrats, carpetbagger functionaries” from building “ugly” wind farms next door, you’ll have to turn around public opinion and get the politicians to stop the subsidies.
/Mr Lynn
James P,
3 mile Island proves the safety of Western Reactor designs, no was hurt as a result of radiation.
Roger Sowell,
I am not sure if your comment about nuclear fusion was directed at me, but I never mention fusion. Fission technology at its present state is enough to last us for the next 10,000 years so we might as well make use of it now, and let future generations worry about fusion.
I disagree with you about the telephone and transmission lines, finding them a horrible blight on the landscape. The transmission lines needed to run power on the scale to run a city like Dallas, from wind energy created in the Panhandle of Texas are going to look even worse on top of a dead flat terrain without any hills or trees to block it from view. Worse still, they will have to build the transmission wire to carry name plate capacity, while most of the time it will be carrying 20% at most.
Panhandle of Texas is dead center in the North American flyway. 3 generations of hunters have been buying duck stamps to preserve and improve our wet lands, and it has been the greatest conservation success story ever, now these politicians and environmentalists who never leave the big cities want to wreck something that is beautiful.
Wind energy is nothing but junk. Might as well invest in modern art or Global Warming Voodoo dolls and stick those out there on the side of the highway. It will save the rate payer money, kill fewer birds and cannot be that much uglier than those stupid windmills.
I had a letter published in our local paper (Charleston, SC, Post & Courier, May 13th) regarding wind power. It was in response to another letter indicating that off-shore wind power could generate (and implicitly replace) twice the power consumed by South Carolinians.
I subsequently got an e-mail from an individual at Clemson University Restoration Institute (although the address was from Eco Energy LLC). His response, however, did not refute any points made about the limited capabilities of wind power, but did indicate that projected figures for SC would be a ‘significant’ 10%. The actual Megawatt capacity may be a significant number, but it’s a far cry from the requirements. I don’t believe in anyones books that 10% is significant. This doesn’t mean that wind power should be abandoned, but when traditional means are plentiful and cheap, the economics plays a significant role.
In general, people cannot comprehend large numbers. Anything above a thousand (kilo, mega, giga, billion, trillion, and so on) is equated to be ‘a lot’. Unfortunately, without a baseline comparison – an error of omission – the political commentary all just hot air which the general public breathe deeply.
Sadly, we live in a Twitteresque world (the next generation of the 30 second YouTube video): if you can’t explain your argument in 140 characters or less, then you have no comprehensible argument.
bill,
If you look at the Glasgow wind speed graphs above, you will note that there were only a few hours during the week when the wind was going 5m/s (11mph) or faster. Thanks for confirming the thesis of the article.
JohnnyB,
Are you advocating the use of breeder reactors? Do you like the prospect of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Pakistan pumping out large quantities of Plutonium?
Follow the money. In the US, T. Boone Pickens and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are raking in the cash from selling windmills. Someone is probably getting rich off going to natural gas too. It’s about transfer of wealth. It always was. If it was about something else, Al Gore would have the smallest carbon foot print on the planet.
Pfft, no-one claimed that wind turbines could produce power when there was no wind. Talk about your straw man arguments, it’s like listening to rabid creationists or anti-vaxxers. Are you denying that they’ll produce reasonable amounts of electricity when there’s wind? Like there is most of the time in Scotland rather than on one cherry-picked week?
And if your argument is more to do with not liking the look of them, well i can’t say oil refineries, tankers and rigs are exactly my cup of tea from an aesthetic point of view either. Or oil spills come to think of it…
Johnnyb (05:49:34) :
No, my fusion comments were a direct response to Steven Goddard.
Re breakthroughs on renewable energy storage: there are at least seven technologies that work quite well, but the economics are not yet viable. These include pumped storage hydroelectric, batteries, ultra-capacitors, flywheels, compressed air energy storage, superconductors, and high pressure hydraulics. Note that Santa Catalina island, offshore California, is to receive a large battery storage system. That should provide a clue as to which horse is winning in that race. Or maybe it simply reflects the local geography.
Steven Goddard, yes, I figured you were up on fusion power issues. I am all for it and support continued research. I don’t have much hope that it will ever happen, at least for the next 50 years. It is a bit difficult to overcome such a basic limitation as the bond-strength between atoms, although I have some ideas. Even if that hurdle is overcome, achieving continuous, controlled fusion remains a problem.
But there are some bright people on WUWT, perhaps one of them will have a flash of insight, obtain a patent, and retire fabulously rich.
You’re being selectively and unduly negative there, Anthony — not least because it’s gloriously sunny in that picture. Early February saw a short-lived cold snap in Britain which produced the coldest temperatures we’ve seen for a long time, with the most snow for over 20 years. But it looks like the solar PV was working fine, as indeed it was here in London nearly all that week.
Glasgow is a windy place. In the west of Scotland, the number of days without any wind isn’t many — this chart of wind speed in Glasgow shows an annual average surface windspeed of 11 knots . and even in your charts, the wind speed spent four days out of seven above 5mph at surface level.
As any meteorologist worth his salt will know, the wind speed increases with height above the surface, and windspeeds at 50 m above the surface (for example, at the top of large, tall turbines) are 75% greater than those that are measured at the surface.
There are plenty of even windier places to choose from on the west coast of Scotland. This wind speed chart for the island of Tiree, just 100 miles NW of Glasgow, shows the annual average wind speed as 14 knots — and it’s one of the sunniest places in Scotland as well.
Even better is to place the wind turbines offshore. Wind velocities are even higher and more consistent. We have a huge amount of wind offshore UK and that is why wind offers enormous potential as an alternative energy source in our windy islands — for reference, here’s the UK government’s view.
This wind map of the UK and offshore areas shows that even in the southeastern coastal areas very near to London, as at Sheerness where the new offshore London Array windfarm is being built, annual average surface windspeeds are around 13 knots — considerably higher than in onshore SE England where this falls to 9 or 10 knots.
Although even offshore the wind isn’t continuous through a few cool clear days, as you point out, it remains a fact that monthly average wind speeds right across the UK and its offshore shelf are highest in the winter when the energy load is at its seasonal peak.
Please see preceding comment on average surface windspeeds in the UK and offshore areas – the presence of reference hyperlinks will likely send this into moderation.
Kind regards from London.
Roads,
During a temperature inversion, like the “Siberian Cold Front” experienced in February, winds are also light “at the top of large, tall turbines.”
But I’ll bet you knew that already.
Bill Marsh: 4000 miles from Canada to Mexico? I must have misinterpreted what you wrote. My map shows it as 1500 miles to the southern tip of Texas.
Flywheels? Calculate the size and speed of a wheel that can store a hundred megawatt hours. And how many you would need. When the bearings on one of those fail (magnetic or whatever) life gets very interesting.
“Rapid self dissassembly”
Here, https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html, you can see in real time the contribution of different energy sources to the whole electric network in Spain. You can move through the calendar choosing different seasons and dates- Apart from the fact of being the wind energy heavily subsidized notice in the graphs the 1:1 backup needed if there’s no wind. In the case of Spain, browse for a day with no wind (green data) and see at peak hour how the hydroelectric energy increases enormously to cushion the lack of wind. See also how maximum energy from wind does not usually match peak hour. It’s easy to play, although it’s in spanish is a self-explanatory gadget and based on real data. Hope it’s useful.
best
Aesthetically, wind power just looks and feels wrong. It’s building thousands of enormous towers to produce small amounts of electricity. It is not doing more with less, it is doing less with more.
People talk as if ANY reduction of CO2 emissions is a good thing, no matter how small, and talk as if ANY use of so-called “renewables” is a good thing. Well i can generate renewable energy just sitting on a bycicle, but so what? How does that replace planes and trains? It costs to do stuff, and doing inneficient low intensity stuff leads to more waste. .
When the bearings on one of those fail (magnetic or whatever) life gets very interesting.
That would be cool to watch-from a distance.
Years ago we had bearing fail on a silage cutter in the field. The cutter head is a metal disc about 3 feet in diameter with blades on it to cut corn and paddles on it to blow it into the wagon behind, or beside. I would guess it to weigh around 3-400 hundred pounds. I can’t remember now, exactly, but when the cutter head went out it traveled something like half a quarter mile before it stopped. AFTER it went through the metal shroud, and running through standing corn as it went.
These include pumped storage hydroelectric, batteries, ultra-capacitors, flywheels, compressed air energy storage, superconductors, and high pressure hydraulics.
So, basically, you’re mainly just trying to overcome the laws of fluid dynamics?
No big deal there.
And, I mean, really, it’s not like anybodies been looking for room temperature superconductors, or high efficiency batteries.
Roads,
You realize that Glasgow is at 56N and the sun barely gets 10 degrees above the horizon in mid-winter? How much solar energy do you think you can generate with that?
The reason why it is cold in the winter is because of a lack of solar energy.
Cannonball Jones weighs in with another creationists slur when he says:
Actually, the biggest problem with wind energy and others like solar PV is simply that the capital you need to throw at it because it is unreliable makes it simply not worth bothering with. You still have to build adequate fast-start base-load generation capacity and you have to build even more expensive distribution systems. The problem is that it doesn’t operate at all the times we need it.
Cannonball,
You completely fail to grasp the point. Society can not shut down for a few weeks, hours, minutes a year. There has to be 100% capacity available from dependable sources at all times.
Would you buy a car or computer if you were told that it sometimes won’t work for a few hours, days or weeks at a time? Try to be rational.
Cannonball Jones (07:07:06) :
Pfft, no-one claimed that wind turbines could produce power when there was no wind. Talk about your straw man arguments, it’s like listening to rabid creationists or anti-vaxxers. Are you denying that they’ll produce reasonable amounts of electricity when there’s wind? Like there is most of the time in Scotland rather than on one cherry-picked week?
It’s a fact that cannot be trivialized – it’s not a straw man argument. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Whether that’s 1% of the time, 15% or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The power companies have a 100% (not 99%, not 99.99%) obligation to ensure that the customer has power.
Roger,
California has built 1744 MW of wind power capacity. However this is nameplate capacity. If we use a capacity value of 10% the farms deliver 174 MW out of a total of 45675 MW or .03%. Most non hydro renewable energy actually produced in California is from Geothermal (2456MW). Hydro produces 21% but I doubt any new capacity willl be added in the near future.
Jon : ” jon (04:18:07) :
But when they are working we burn a lot less fossil fuels! If they work at full capacity for 30% of the year then we burn less fossil fuels for 30% of the year … surely that makes sense?”
No Jon, they don’t produce useful power. Wind is not dispatchable. Fact is after nearly two decades of building wind mills, Denmark is using more fossil fueled electricity generation than it was in 1990. Because they’re connected to the west side of Denmark’s electricity grid, the only effect they seem to have is on the dispatch of Norwegian and Swedish hydro and some German gas fired installations.
As for Germany, you need to read Eon’s performance reports of their wind fleets over the past two years to truly understand just how utterly useless wind turbines are.
enercon power curve for 2MW generator
http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/762/powercurvefh1.jpg
Wind speed is measured at HUB height i.e. ground/forest effects are not slowing the wind
The wind speed for Glasgow is not the wind speed for whitelees completely different conditions.
The latest turbine
Note starts generating a 2.5metres/sec
cuts out 28m/s
http://www.enercon.de/en/e112.htm
Gearless ENERCON system
Rated power:
4,500 – 6,000 kW
Rotor diameter: 114 m
Hub height: 124 m(in situ concrete tower)
Generator: Direct-drive ENERCON ring generator
Cut-in wind speed:2.5 m/s
Cut-out wind speed:28 – 34 m/s
Roads (07:17:30) :
Britain, or indeed Europe, is not the US. An additional problem is that the perception is that the US is ‘backwards’ when compared to the US, since we are so far behind the curve as far as alternative energies are concerned. As indicated in a previous post, the Scots have little need for air conditioning. Look at a temperature map of the US during the 6/8 months of the year around the summer months. Indeed, the climate for the US follows a greater extreme than a lot of European countries.
There’s no argument that wind speeds are more consistent in some parts of the world than others (I often wonder why all these starving Ethiopians don’t just hit the McDonalds if they are hungry; or grow a few carrots). Facetiousness aside, what works in one location doesn’t necessarily work in another. Britain is ‘lucky’ in this regard – consistent wind speeds, a reasonably mild climate all year round, and an abundance of natural gas.
Satisfying the energy requirements to keep Americans in the same luxury that Europeans are used to takes a lot of energy. The US does have a ‘significant’ alternative energy industry, but there are practical limitations which are being overlooked (ignored) since the media and politicians painting a tragedy in the making.
(To clarify, the perception is that the US is far behind the curve with regards to alternative energies, whereas the reality is different).
Steven Goddard,
Yes, I do like the idea of North Korea, Iran and Venezuela having nuclear bombs. I believe the nuclear bombs hve been the greatest peace device the world has ever known, and that they make the consequences of war so horrible that once everyone has them the world will finally know peace.
BTW: You know what we make in Amarillo, right? PANTEX ring a bell?