In a statement made last Friday by EDF Energies Nouvelles (French Green Power Company), a power purchase agreement was terminated without explanation by Indianapolis Power and Light Company regarding the supply of wind energy by enXco, a local EDF company. The contract was unilaterally terminated by IPL, and more than 10 days later, EDF has acknowledged it to the market.
The IPL wind power project web page is here
From the press release see here
======================
PRESS RELEASE
March 12th, 2010
Termination of the Lakefield PPA by IPL
On March 1, enXco, the US subsidiary of EDF Energies Nouvelles, received notification that the US utility Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPL) would terminate the power purchase agreement related to the 201 MW Lakefield wind project currently under development (southwestern Minnesota).
The project received the approval of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) on January 27, 2010. The IURC’s order was consistent with similar past orders. IPL has purported to unilaterally terminate the power purchase agreement on the basis of this order without providing further specific reasons.
enXco is considering its rights and remedies within the framework of the PPA. In addition, the Company is currently analyzing several options, including re-marketing the project to one or several other utilities.
Consistent with EDF Energies Nouvelles policy, construction has not yet started.
The 2012 operational objective of 4,200 MW net and 2010 objective of EBITDA will not be impacted by the Lakefield project evolution.
================
big h/t to Ecotretas
Page 1
PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE
Paris, March 12, 2010 Paris, March 12, 2010
Termination of the PPA by Lakefield IPL Termination of the Lakefield PPA by IPL
On March 1, enXco, the U.S. subsidiary of EDF Energies Nouvelles, received On March 1, enXco, the US subsidiary of EDF Energies Nouvelles, received
notification that the U.S. utility Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPL) notification that the US utility Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPL)
would terminate the power purchase agreement related to the 201 MW would terminate the power purchase agreement related to the 201 MW
Lakefield wind project currently under development (southwestern Lakefield wind project currently under development (southwestern
Minnesota). Minnesota).
The project received the approval of the Indiana Utility Regulatory The project received the approval of the Indiana Utility Regulatory
Commission (iurc) on January 27, 2010. Commission (IURC) on January 27, 2010. The iurc’s order was consistent The IURC’s order was consistent
with similar past orders. with similar past orders. IPL has purported to unilaterally terminate the IPL has purported to unilaterally terminate the
power purchase agreement on the basis of this order without providing power purchase agreement on the basis of this order without providing
further specific reasons. further specific reasons.
enXco is considering its rights and remedies within the framework of the enXco is considering its rights and remedies within the framework of the
PPA. PPA. In addition, the Company is currently analyzing several options, In addition, the Company is currently analyzing several options,
including re-marketing the project to one or several other utilities. including re-marketing the project to one or several other utilities.
Consistent with EDF Energies Nouvelles policy, construction has not yet Consistent with EDF Energies Nouvelles policy, construction has not yet
started. started.
The 2012 operational objective of 4.200 MW and 2010 net objective of The 2012 operational objective of 4,200 MW net and 2010 objective of
EBITDA will not be impacted by the project Lakefield evolution. EBITDA will not be impacted by the Lakefield project evolution.
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” Troels Halken (02:29:32) :
[…]
Hence they operate with wind forecasts, and these are about 90-95% reliable (predicting wind speed is a lot easier than to predict weather as a whole). ”
Maybe for times when there is little wind. On stormy days, you can never know the exact moment the wind suddenly strikes and sets thousands of wind turbines across North Germany in motion. A giant power surge sweeps across the grid and the fast reaction gas powered plants will have to shut down as fast as they can exactly in that moment or your grid is toast. Coal and nuclear are thermal base load, they could never react with the speed needed, you don’t want Xenon poisoning in a nuclear plant…
So your 90-95% forecast precision, i think that’s a red herring.
Christopher Booker had an excellent – and depressing – piece in last weekend’s printed Sunday Telegraph, about wind farms and their effects on the bird population. He states that the Altamont Pass wind farm, in California, has killed between 2000 and 3000 golden eagles in the past 20 years, about two every week. The problem is that these types of birds and wind farms tend to concentrate in the same areas where hills and ridges provide lift for soaring birds. In another example, wind farms in Tasmania have pushed a unique sub-species of wedge-tailed eagles close to extinction.
As has been pointed out at WUWT, there is absolutely no evidence to support the theory that we’re in the midst of one of the great species extinctions in Earth’s history due to globalwarming – but these pointless windmills are certainly doing their bit.
As Booker points out, one of the sad, sad aspects of this tragedy is that bird protection societies, including the RSPB, appear to have been bought out by the wind power industry. They are getting lots of money. Until recently the societies opposed wind power for the obvious reason. But no longer. Money talks, as they say. Utterly sickening.
I just hope that I live to see all this AGW-inspired madness swept away. But I’m not very optimistic. The delusion is too wide, too deep and, for many, too profitable.
Chris
To Grant (20:52:33) : You say “Ummm- shouldn’t someone say something”
I thought about it. Dalton McGuinty is my MPP. However, our Ontario government is on record that it wants to destroy all our nice cheap and efficient coal fired generating stations by 2017, or whatever the most recent date is. It might just be worthwhile Ontario wasting $7 bn, so as to convince our politicians that, at least with current technology, clean coal is still best for electricity generation. Cleaning up the real pollution (not CO2) from the coal fired stations is only about $1.5 bn.
Those with an interest in windpower – and other real and potential – ‘renewables’ for power generation may want to read my item at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging, bird swatters that make NO reduction to emissions from a grid-distributed power system and provide NO USEFUL electricity to such a system.
Richard
Can windturbines deliver electricity during storms?
To my recollection, it is during storms most blackouts occur.
So if all or most of electricity is to come from windturbines, how vulnerable will society be??
Just asking.
“this simply means the maintenance costs and manpower required are greater per megawatt than any other energy production source: saying it creates jobs is actually a bad thing in this case because these jobs don’t create revenue (contrast with, say, a retail store or factory).”
I think you should tell Siemens, GE and all the other companies that provide O&M servies for the wind turbines, that O&M of wind turbines does not generate revenue, cause that will be new to them.
Do you really think that companies does something for nothing and then you expect other people will believe that? Just how stupid do you think people are?
——–
Also
3) Coal or oil powered stations kept running in case the wind dies down.
4) The electricity used to get the turbine started!
5) All the other resources used to produce the wind turbine
“Anticlimactic (20:03:35) :
I wonder what the carbon footprint of a wind turbine is?
Lots of concrete,…”
And the creation/use of concrete in the UK, at least, amounts to more C02 emissions than any other source (SUV’s, energy etc etc) of C02. How many windmills do we need? I for one would like to run one on “my” patio, but I can’t as it would “look” errrmmm….”messy”, like hanging washing on lines. In Australia we can be fined AU$5000 for “hanging washing” viewable from the outside making the building “look messy” (In strata managed buildings) or even go to prinson for upto 12 months! I kid you not!
So yes, as someone else mentioned the “lucky country” isn’t (Unless you have a shedload of cash. Read lawyers, corporates, politicians etc)!
Power generation could be a great deal cheaper. The science and technology to be far more efficient and produce 18 times the current output is available.
Subsities, politics, manufacturers profit, all conspire to hide this technology.
This technology has passed engineers and CEO of a Hydro Electric producer in Manitoba, Canada.
Current science has not realized that when dealing with a circular motion and speed, density changes of the mass and stored energy is created in the material. This changes with the speed of rotation.
This is changing the center of balance in the material to compress mass at a molecular level.
AdderW (04:18:38) :
Can windturbines deliver electricity during storms?
It depends on the speed of the winds in the storm. Wind turbines have a very narrow wind of wind speed to operate under. Too fast would generate a surge of too much electricity and could burn out the wind turbine so safety devices are installed to disconnect.
@ur momisugly Person of Choler (19:25:25) :
hey, thanks for that link … 🙂
I was trying, up to present in vain, to get some electricity-from-wind data for Belgium during the low wind months december, january, february … but nobody of the producers, nor the disributor was eager to “show off” and make the data available …
George Turner (22:10:23) :
Making Portland cement or aluminum come to mind, but I think a better application might be running rock crushers to make gravel. The input is rock whose storage costs are zero, the output is gravel whose storage costs are zero, and you could hook the crusher to the windmills with a drive shaft instead of expensive electric generators and motors.
Nobel and good ideas but not viable to a work schedule waiting for the wind.
How would you like to be the poor smuck who hasn’t worked all week because there was no wind?
Layne Blanchard (18:59:16) :
E.M.Smith (18:13:40) :
Not taking an issue with your point, but I wonder if we really lose in that trade with China. A given set of Uber name brand tools costing $1000 (made in America) might be $100 in a comparable set made in china. If we receive a useful good, the money isn’t wasted. Mfg industry is diminished, but inflation is mitigated. Don’t have any wisdom to share on it, but I really wonder if we’re losing.
OF COURSE YOU ARE LOSING!
Someone rich pockets the profits and thousands, maybe millions of you are out of a Job, how can you win?
Those that are left in work have to pay tax to support all the unemployed while the rich continue with off Shore accounts, pay very little tax and continue investing in China and India.
“China Idles 40% of Windpower Turbine Output Capacity
Businessweek ^ | March 11, 2010 | Ying Wang
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 5:36:54 PM by NRG1973
China is idling as much as 40 percent of its wind-turbine factories following a surge in investment driven by the government’s renewable-energy goals, the vice president of Shanghai Electric Group Corp. said.
Prices of turbines have tumbled more than 30 percent from 2004 levels in the world’s third-biggest windpower market by generating capacity because there are “too many” plants, Lu Yachen said in an interview in Beijing today.
China set a goal to increase its power-production capacity from wind by fivefold in 2020, spurring investment in turbine factories. There is a surplus of such plants, National Energy Administration head Zhang Guobao said in September, without giving figures.
“The overcapacity in manufacturing is caused by slower growth in wind-farm construction due to power-grid constraints,” Dave Dai, an analyst with CLSA Asia Pacific Markets, said by telephone from Hong Kong. “The issues with the grid aren’t expected to ease in the near term but should improve with the development of smart-grid investment over time.”
Currently, only part of China’s power grid is able to take delivery of the electricity produced by renewable energy. Grid constraints in China may leave as much as 4 gigawatts of windpower generation capacity lying idle, Sunil Gupta, managing director for Asia and head of clean energy at Morgan Stanley, said in November.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com …”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2469894/posts
Well maybe they will find new contracts in the future
I would be willing to wager a small sum that the reason the contract was canceled was 1) They can’t afford it being that state and municipal coffers are empty and the populace is in no mood to take on additional debt.
2) Since construction had not started I suspect there is some doubt that the entity could be got up and running anywhere near schedule.
JustPassing (02:09:50) :
From what I read and saw few months ago, China is keeping a firm hold on rare earth materials for its own uses and strickly limiting supplies to the rest of the world……………
The YouTube vid is very informative.
We had OPEC, now we can expect REEC [Rare Earth Exporting Countries]controlled by China.
The whole thing is starting to REEK!
The video does a good job of making China look bad environmentally.
60 AMPS is the capacity of home systems for both solar and wind power systems.
The battery life guarantee of the huge 2 volt batteries is two years and must be in a vented area plus you need 12 of these. The technicians say you will get 5 years.
So is the home system viable compared to the grid?
At this time no, not until the batteries and technology changes more.
The problem with most wind cost studies is that the problems and costs do not become apparent until one tries to integrate a significant amount of wind.
ISO New England has a good study for adding 23% wind energy by 2030 (does only half the 50% CO2 reduction typically required by 2030) –go to iso-ne.com and search for “econ 2030”.
23% wind requires 4200 circuit miles of dual 500-765 kv transmission encircling New England (a region about 400 miles long). The transmission capacity required by the intermittent wind is 6-12 times the present single 345 kv backbone. The transmission will likely encounter much opposition as the dual 500-765 kv transmission lines encircle the suburbs of Boston and Hartford and go through the mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and the coastal region of Maine.
The cost of adding 23% wind energy is:
1. 12000 MW of wind generation- about 5-8000 towers $36B 100,000+ acres
2. 4200 circuit miles- mostly dual 500-765 KV transmission $25B 100,000+ acres
3. 5000 MW of pumped storage $20B 5 mountaintops
4. 3000 MW Canadian DC transmission links $7B
5. Total $88B
6. Cost per kWh: 30 cents per kWh or 3-4 times present generation costs
Since most pumped storage ponds can only store 8 hours of electricity, additional load management is required in the form of adding electric cars and electric heat:
2.5 million electric cars at $20k premium $50B
And $5+ B for smart grid.
And conversion to electric heat in Maine- Cost?
The same job could be done with 3500 MW nuclear (2-3 units) on existing sites with less emissions for $20B or ¼ the cost (or 1/7 the cost if you include the car premium).
Troels
“Steel in itself is a material and does not have a carbon footprint”
Not true. The iron ore had to be dug up. The iron ore had to be loaded onto a ship and transported across the ocean. Then iron ore was melted using huge amounts of energy and processed into steel. The steel was then shipped a long way to the site. The entire process take a very large amount of energy, and none of that energy is ‘renewable’ and all of it was caused by burning stuff.
These are the very same arguments used to highlight the ‘carbon footprint’ of cows as opposed to vegies grown in your garden.
Wind “energy” is a pathetic fraud. Obscene subsidies for a weak, intermittent and unreliable source of energy that really isn’t “green”. In time, it will be looked at as one of the biggest mistakes of our era.
AdderW (04:18:38) :
Electricity blackouts during storms are not from loss of generation ; they are from loss of transmission, usually in leafy suburbs where people like to live and storms break branches and tress. My neighbour is an emergency powerline technician – he doesn’t have a single tree around his house.
Coal fired , nuclear and hydro plants run no matter what the weather. Wind turbines have to be shut down in high wind.
Yea! Good riddance. Wind power and the unsightly monstrous sometimes-waving-arms has been mostly a boondoggle. And yet there is a sadness when we must recognize that the most important reason is that the U.S. does not need new power — we don’t produce much. (See E.M. Smith 18:13:40) Time to change that.
Troels Halken (02:29:32) : As a wind energy professional (from Denmark), I am quite intrigued to read through the argument in this tread. [ ]
JimInIndy (21:44:14). The amount of steel used for a turbine varies with manufacturer, tower height and most importantly nominal effect. I’d say that 250 tones is about 1,5-2MW turbine. Steel in itself is a material and does not have a carbon footprint, so you first question is not valid.
You did alright until “Steel itself is a material and does not have a carbon footprint”. Don’t know much about how ‘materials’ come to be do you?
If the wind don’t blow!
And the blades say no!
How is the electricty going to go? go? go?