I was in Newcastle, NSW AU on Wednesday night to give another lecture as part of the Australian speaking tour I’m doing. I had the pleasure of following David Stockwell in a presentation, and David Archibald followed me.
We were a bit late getting there due to airplane scheduling snafus, and as we rushed from the airport at 6:15 pm we passed the coal loading terminal at Newcastle. There, as if there was some madcap attempt at sustainability, was one of those huge wind turbines like I’ve seen on the US plains. I attempted to get a photo, but my camera misfired with bad focus due to the car window, and I missed the shot.
The next morning, on the way to the airport again at 6AM, the windmill was still there, just like it was before. My driver (Anthony#2 of Team Anthony) gladly pulled over to allow me to get this shot as dawn crept in. I was incredulous that the shot hadn’t changed.
Ummm. I thought windmills were all about generating electricity, not using it. So why put torches on it that run all night? Want to bet the lighting power is coming from coal? While the turbine probably generates more power than it uses most nights, it sure seems odd.
Of course, maybe the people that run it really didn’t want a wind turbine in their coal town, and this torch lighting is their form of silent protest. Or, maybe they are proud of it and felt it needed to be illuminated all hours of the night. Maybe the lights are to warn off birds and small planes. Nobody seemed to know. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but be amused.
I don’t wish to demean the proud hard working people in Newcastle in any way, I just thought this was very odd and worth noting. Thanks to everyone who attended our talk. A special thank you to the two protesters handing out flyers at the city hall telling everyone how wrong we are.
Too bad you didn’t stick around to see what you were protesting about, you might have found it interesting. The flyers handed out were obviously written without the benefit of knowing what was being presented that night. Kids, do your homework.
Here is what the Newcastle wind turbine looks like during the day, note the coal terminal in the background.
From the Newcastle City Photos Blog:
Newcastle’s only big wind turbine seems to be reaching up to the sky for the breezes to keep the city running during the approaching night! Is this the future of energy, ‘free’ renewable and non polluting. For a city which has been based on technology we are slow to move on from the old coal based power structure. People want their power but what is the cost? Later generations will have to put up with the results of our excessive use and pollution it causes.
Background on Newcastle from Hunter Valley Eguide:
Newcastle lies approximately 160 kilometres north of Sydney. Newcastle is the seventh largest city in Australia and is the largest city which is not a state or federal capital. It has a population of approximately 300,000. Newcastle was founded on 30th March 1804 as a penal settlement, so has a selection of buildings old by Australian standards, as well as beaches, surf, impressive coastal scenery, bushland and a well-known lake. It is also an important port, especially for the export of coal, of which resource some 70 million tonnes passes through the city annually.
Thanks to Anthony, Sue and many others who helped out in Newcastle. On behalf of David Stockwell, David Archibald, and myself, I thank you for your hospitality and efforts.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Anthony, when you fly into Canberra take a look at the wind farm on the shores of Lake George – if Parliament is in session you will actually see the rotors going round due to all the hot air emanating from Parliament House. Otherwise they dont move at all!
Wind Rider says:
June 18, 2010 at 6:36 am
Wind turbines use the full diameter of a circle. Any energy not touching the blades is inefficient. They are less then 2% efficient even before they move. There are other factors that contribute to make it even more inefficient but suffice to say, if you spin the blades fast enough, NO energy will touch the blades.
Glad you liked our windmill!
I do have to say though its a pilot windmill that has been around forever (I’ve been here 20 years and I can’t remember when it was built). After the first one the state government power company didn’t build any more, to their credit. They have been avoiding building new generator capacity for years because the only sane option coal is political suicide, but recently after some epic political fights they’ve quietly authorised a couple of new coal fired generators.
Meanwhile last month a new coal loader was opened, taking coal capacity to 130 Mt/a. No government officials or politicos dared be seen, so only opposition pollies were there.
I once was on the same flight you took, but in the day, and sat next to a retired USN captain who’d never been to Newcastle before. I said look out the window, you’ll see our fleet. Fleet? He was floored by the view, which was about 3-4% of world bulk carrier capacity at anchor. Demurrage costs alone are about $1.5 billion per year for the ships to just sit and wait until they can get in to the loaders.
Where are you off to next? You might wish to pay a visit to the Mexican Gulf. While you are there you might also wish to reassure the locals along the coast they have nothing to worry about, as fish have been swallowing muck for the past few million years and an Exxon Valdez every four days spewing oil didn’t hurt anyone. After reading your churlish post I hope you and your followers are right, or else we are in a god almighty pickle.
Hugh Hunt,
That was not a “churlish” post by Anthony.
Is it just me or are the blades in the exact same position in both photographs?
Mrs. Brute and I came accross a windmill “farm” afixed to a ridgeline in central Pennsylvania last winter. Eight of Ten weren’t moving……….
Hugh Hunt,
I recommend you read up on the Ixtoc-1 oil spill disaster of 1979, which was uncannily similar to this Deepwater Horizon one, only bigger.
The Gulf seems not to have suffered too badly from that one, not that BP should escape liability.
One difference is that the owner was the then state owned Pemex, who cited sovereign immunity when asked to pay compensation. In other words ‘get lost’. You can see why most oil production is being taken over by state oil companies given the relative cost of production this implies.
Roger Sowell links to some official data, courtesy of big Arnie purporting to show wind capacity factor, actual output, as high as 70% of capacity [San Gorgonio, 2nd qtr 1998]; whoopie do! The graphs also show the main concern with wind; that is, when it doesn’t blow in one place then it doesn’t blow anywhere; San Gordonio’s 4th qtr result in 1998 was 19% of capacity!
Then there is the relative cost of these stupid indulgences cf with fossils and in particular, nuclear. That’s the point and I note the big Arnie report on wind did not include the relative costs per capacity factor; every 1 of those MW’s from wind cost up to 10 times the equivalent MW from fossils. End of story.
Brute – yes our windmill works, and probably even makes some power.
Not apparent from the photos is it is just across the river from the main centre of Newcastle, and is highly visible, so I think the (state owned) power company makes sure it at least looks like it operates.
here’s a good site showing the output of Australia’s wind farms.
http://windfarmperformance.info/?date=2010-05-08
Regards solar in Australia.
I have been offered a 1.48kW solar system by a local solar company.
It will consist of 8 x 185W panels and a new power meter to feed back into the grid.
The cost to me after all the government subsidies is $2999.00 @ur momisugly $890 deposit and the balance paid interest free over 2 years @ur momisugly around $88/month or $263.6/quarter.
My last quarter electricity bill was $298 which is my summer bill – my winter bill is nearly twice that.
I currently pay 19.620c /kWh and 7.480c/kWh for off peak consumption (my water heater).
The government will pay me 60c/kWh for the power I feed back into the grid. The solar company estimate my system will average 5kWh/day which over a quarter will return $273.75 so my total summer bill should be around $25.00 the remainder being subsidized by the Australian Taxpayer to make the government appear green.
Gary Turner said: “For electricity, I would have had to pay the electric company for fifty poles and two transformers to branch off the single ended line ten miles out from the source.”
“I settled on a wind turbine plus battery solution”
This is a point often forgotten. If the cost of a connection to a power supply is large enough, wind or solar power may be an economic option without any subsidies (which are often a bad idea).
It cost me thousands of dollars to run a powerline underground to the main supply right outside my house. I had to pay for a meter and inspections. I have to pay a supply charge every month. I have had to buy emergency lighting, power and cooking facilities in case of a power cut.
As time goes on, the cost of mains power increases and the cost of solar or wind power decreases (with newer technology). I’m in sunny, windy and warm New Zealand. At some point it will be economic for me to generate all of my own power. I’m not at that point yet, but that day will come.
The majority of NZ power is hydroelectric. That is an excellent backup for wind power when the wind stops. We have plenty of hydro generation capability but not enough water. So wind power may be economic for NZ.
The options for the rest of the world will be different. In the short term a subsidy for wind power may help to get a viable source of power from the wind. Any new technology deserves help at the start, but not a subsidy for ever.
It takes many years to construct a new hydro dam or nuclear power generator etc. During construction there is no income, perhaps for 10 years or far longer. The powerlines from those may be very long and expensive, since nobody wants to live near a nuclear generator or to live under a dam or near a coal burning power station.. It takes quite a short time to erect a wind turbine, and I’d be prepared to live a few miles from a wind turbine as long as I couldn’t hear it. So the power lines will be short and cheap, and transmission losses will be low.
Please can everybody include all of the costs when evaluating the different power generation options. Including the huge costs for decommissioning a nuclear generator when it’s 30 or 40 years old. Would you trust a car that old every day? And when your old car fails it is unlikely to splatter nuclear radiation all over Europe.
Hugh Hunt… your point is what?
Doing things for the wrong reasons is still wrong. Building windmills is tokenism.
So there is an oil spill. That’s the cost of the society in which we choose to live. What viable alternative do you have or propose (which does not involve some kind of pork barrelling)?
A large govt handout always leads to snouts in the trough (home insulation schemes? got one here going cheap!)
—-
The Weekend Financial Review here in Oz has a nice big article about being green and the amount of the solar rebates – it varies from 44 to 60 cents / kWhr. Mostly this is Net (ie you get paid for what you generate after your consumption is accounted for). A couple of schemes are complete madness – Gross payments of 60 cents/kWhr – you get paid regardless.
What this all means is that those of us w/o solar panels PAY a subsidy for those who have them. They get to take the moral high ground, at the expense of the rest of us. That does get me grumpy.
If the economics of putting in solar panels stacked up (even on a net payment scheme), I’d be in like a shot. I like the idea of having a $0 electricity bill (I don’t care about being paid) but I’d really like to run my a/c in summer.
Power prices in southern Australia have risen way above CPI for the last few years and are set to continue to do so, partly to pay for infrastructure that is now 50-60 years old and has had insufficient maintenance, and partly to pay for the various green subsidies.
Of course the other moral high ground cop-out is to sign up and buy “green power” from your power retailer, which is usually more expensive. I don’t know that there are any audits done on green power consumption vs generation – my suspicion is that gas fired power qualifies as “green” and thus allows the scam to continue.
@roger Sowell — the point is useful electricity. Even when the wind is blowing, the output is so skittering that it strains the capacity of the grid to maintain constant VA flow. This has been the universal experience of grid operaters all over the world. Backup plants — most often gas — have to be kept constantly spun up on warm standby ready to fill in on a minute’s notice. As noted by several commenters, turbine output varies as the cube of the wind speed. This means that a breeze gusting from 20 to 30 mph — a 50% variation, not at all uncommon — produces output that momentarily triples, then drops back unpredictably. There is no power grid in the world that could withstand this vacilation by even 25% of its generating units, let alone what that would do to the air conditioners, stoves, factories, and televisions of the end users.
But the catch-22 is that even though the actual output of these things over the long term is 12% or less of their nameplate capacity, still both the backup plants and the hideously long transmission lines required to get this output from the windswept rural and wilderness areas they infest to the chi-chi city users prattling about how reactionary the NIMBYs are — both of these facilities have to allow for nearly the full nameplate output, or they’ll blow on output peaks. So still more useless capital outlay at the expense of the taxpayers and ratepayers, not to mention still more environmental destruction from the line of marching transmission towers.
Several commenters have pointed out the incredible cost per MW of these towers — at the moment around $1 million US per MW to erect. The decommissioning cost per tower (regardless of capacity, at present) is estimated at about $1 millon. Apologists for wind have pointed out that these are of the same magnitude as nukes — which is true of the older-generation plants in the US and UK, but not of the newer designs common in France and planned for India (what does that say about American civilization that we now look to France and India for technical innovation?). But this overlooks two points:
— At the end of their life, the nukes, like coal and gas plants, will have been producing at around 90% capacity for the entire period. Wind won’t even come close — even the plastic enthusiastic promoters never cllaim more than 30%.
— The useful life of a conventional plant is 40 years. With careful maintenance, experience shows this can be extended to 60 years, as the UK is about to find out. Wind plant calculations are based on 20 years, and experience is starting to show that an average of even ten years per turbine is optimistic. Maintenance on a turbine is hideously expensive, due to their dispersal and specialized (100 tons sitting 300 feet in the air in a remote area) requirements. You can’t just keep spares and a well-trained crew “on site” if you need a 350-foot crane to put the parts in place. If the turbine is offshore, the maintenance costs increase by a factor of around three or four. Such a bargain, “free” energy!
@Pamela tells us that the beautiful Snake River Gorge is overrun with these monstrosities. She may well be covering over the same heartbreak I feel when I contemplate the wholesale destruction of countryside and wildlife habitat that I’ve seen from Wolfe Island, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence, to Horicon Marsh in my native Wisconsin. Not to mention the Flint Hills of Kansas, the highlands of Scotland, the Lakes District in England, country woods in Germany, and peaceful rural areas from Corsica to Australia.
There was a time when “green” activists were telling us we had to care for the natural environment to preserve it for our children — and they had a point, the same point made by hunters and fishermen and farmers and other conservationists for decades. But now they are actively promoting the most wide-ranging, hideous, and utterly pointless vandalization of the remaining wild areas of the planet that has ever been seen.
A couple of generations from now, long after Gore’s idiotic sci-fi horror flick An Inconvenient Truth has become a camp cult classic but is otherwise forgotten, when every square yard of countryside is within site of a phalanx of disintegrating turbines, fans broken and lubricants dripping into the soil, when children ask “why did they do it? It was so pretty” — the tribal elders will have no choice but to answer, “Sorry. We are now all trapped forever as extras in War of the Worlds meets Rube Goldberg: a Scrooge McDuck Production.”
This is finally the legacy the Greens will leave us. I sincerely hope they are proud of their farsightedness.
Why do I feel like suddenly breaking out with singing…. I am I Don Quixote the Lord of Lamanche – forward and onward I go (the sound of horses hoofs clopping)
I dream the impossible dream – to reach the impossible hydrocarbon in the clouds causing greenhouse effect, no matter how hopeless no matter how little CO2 has to do with warming….. To dream the impossible dream…
picture Al Gore waking up from a dream with a beard and a spear in his bed with his little hobby horse hugged at his side since Tippers gone..
He whimpers and goes back to sleep dreaming about his millions and the impossible dream….
exit stage left
So Anthony,
you never said, what did the kiddies down under think you were talking about that they were in such a huff?
janama (and others):
The solar power thing is a con. The sales-critter’s estimate is (typically) based on 1-sun radiation for 6 hours every day with optimum orientation. They are using customers to gain Renewable Energy Certificates and to harvest taxpayer-funded subsidies with almost no hope of any nett increase in power generation or reduction in any GHG.
There are other scams in the soup such as the loss of off-peak electricty rates by some providers when the infeed meter is connected.
I’ve checked the actual amount of insolation in my area and it’s simply not worth it.
The probable level of insolation is given by the mean minus one standard deviation as per the chart. i.e. about 6750 MJ/m^2 per year.
The touted 8*185W panels are probably of about 10% to 12% nett efficiency under 1-sun. So that’ll cover about 14 square metres of roof. Looking at the probable insolation levels (and disregarding orientation/shadin/cleaning issues), the total electrical power produced in a year would be about 2700 kWh.
Without a bribe to feed into the grid, that electricity is worth $0.1962 * 2700) a year.
About $515.00. The only cost that you’re told about is the $3000, but there’s a subsidy which distorts the market. The true cost is probably closer to $8000, if not $10,000.
So the total payback period for installation is around 20 years. If the system doesn’t last thatlong, or it needs substantial maintenance, etc, etc, the installation of such systems is a nett societal dis-benefit.
In other words; it’s a WASTE of money, time and resources.
@ur momisugly Craig Goodrich, June 18, 2010 at 8:42 pm — ok, I’ll rebut the falsehoods.
“. . .the point is useful electricity. Even when the wind is blowing, the output is so skittering that it strains the capacity of the grid to maintain constant VA flow. This has been the universal experience of grid operaters all over the world. “
No, it does not strain the grid. You have the theory correct, but only for a monotonic supply system, and few (I would venture none) modern grids are monotonic. Instead, there are multiple generating plants feeding a grid, typically dozens or even hundreds. The actual experience of grids such as California, Texas, and Iowa are cases in point. These grids are not struggling.
A wind-turbine and its variability should be compared to industrial loads such as motors or steel mills’ furnaces. For a 1 MW wind-turbine, with output of 20 percent capacity due to whatever wind speed exists, the power to the grid from that one wind-turbine is 200 kW. A fifty percent increase, to use your example, is a 100 kW increase to 300 kW. That is not even a noticeable blip on the grid. Even multiplied across by hundreds of similar wind-turbines in the same area, the effect is not instantaneous because the wind-turbines are spaced relatively far apart. In contrast, a large motor in a chemical plant may consume 5000 Hp, or even 10,000 Hp, which is roughly 3,730 kW or 7,460 kW. The load on these motors also can vary, with swings of 10 percent not uncommon – 370 kW or 750 kW at a moment’s notice. The grid can easily handle these swings, and has done so for many decades. The grid also handles a motor such as just described tripping off-line, and drawing zero current instantaneously, or the reverse, startup when much more current is required.
” Backup plants — most often gas — have to be kept constantly spun up on warm standby ready to fill in on a minute’s notice.”
This is simply not true. For a multi-unit grid supply system, the grid operator has a pre-determined plan of adding and removing generating capacity to meet the anticipated load. Most often this is accomplished by reducing several power plants to a comfortable range, perhaps 80 percent of rated output – but not “spun up on warm standby.” Then when load increases, these throttled-back plants simply increase output to meet the new demand.
“As noted by several commenters, turbine output varies as the cube of the wind speed. This means that a breeze gusting from 20 to 30 mph — a 50% variation, not at all uncommon — produces output that momentarily triples, then drops back unpredictably. There is no power grid in the world that could withstand this vacilation by even 25% of its generating units, let alone what that would do to the air conditioners, stoves, factories, and televisions of the end users.”
As above, this is absolutely no problem for multiple generating grid systems. California has been doing this for decades, and Texas has a shorter history but is managing quite well with far more wind-turbine generation, not only in MWh but also as a percent of the state’s total power. Iowa is cranking right along, also.
“But the catch-22 is that even though the actual output of these things over the long term is 12% or less of their nameplate capacity, . . . “
Again, not necessarily a true statement. The capacity factor, as I wrote above, depends on location and wind. California’s statewide annualized capacity factor is approximately 22 percent, from the link shown above, Table 2.9. The best site, San Gorgonio, has a capacity factor of 28.9. The worst site in the study was Solano, at 14.6.
“. . . still both the backup plants and the hideously long transmission lines required to get this output from the windswept rural and wilderness areas they infest to the chi-chi city users prattling about how reactionary the NIMBYs are — both of these facilities have to allow for nearly the full nameplate output, or they’ll blow on output peaks. So still more useless capital outlay at the expense of the taxpayers and ratepayers, not to mention still more environmental destruction from the line of marching transmission towers.”
I’m always amused at this argument:- wind requires long transmission lines, and they mar the view and the environment. It is a very good thing such thinking did not exist when Hoover Dam was built, and the hundreds of miles of transmission lines were built to bring the power to Los Angeles. The same for the hydroelectric dams in Washington State on the Columbia River, and the transmission lines that bring the power into California – hundreds of miles. And the same for the coal-fired power plants in Utah that continue to supply power to Los Angeles through transmission lines of roughly 500 miles. Or the triple-header nuclear reactor at Palo Verde in Arizona, again sending power over transmission lines to Southern California.
The transmission lines are not at full capacity even when wind-turbines were but a dream. Each night in the off-peak season, typically second quarter in California, the grid demand drops to an annual low. Imported and thermal power each decreases, and the transmission lines are at a low load. Nobody seems to cry in their beer over this.
As to the remainder of your arguments, you fail to see the benefits. Crane companies love the additional work. Windmill service companies also provide jobs. Plus, the siting of the wind-turbines across the US Great Plains is not “remote areas.” Where rugged terrain is chosen for wind-turbines, the project owners should factor in the additional costs of maintenance. If that kills their project, so be it. Build them in Texas, or Kansas, or Oklahoma, or Nebraska, or another fairly flat state.
You appear to be pro-nuclear. Not a good position, as it is indefensible. WUWT has had several posts on this, and I hope you read the commentary, some of which was mine. I also wrote several articles on my own blog about the disadvantages of nuclear power.
Anthony,
You cannot understand Newcastle until you understand ‘The Newcastle Song’ by Bob Hudson.
Sorry, but I cannot find the unexpurgated version, which is much funnier.
LOL… The reason it is lit up Anthony, is that the Socialists that put it there using our money, think they are advertising the future……
They sure are.
But the future we are picturing with it, is not the same future they are envisioning.
When we look at it, we see a useless article that can’t deliver cheap power, costs taxpayers money to sustain and won’t work in a pink fit.
When the Socialists look at it they see fluffy bunny rabbits dancing with children while the windmill spins a kaleidoscope of marvelous colours that feed the soul…. or sumthin’ like that……….. D’oh!
Anthony’s photo of the wind turbine on the hunter river is not our only green energy source in Newcastle.
The one Anthony photographed is connected to the state grid, we can all make use of this green energy by agreeing to pay a surcharge on our electricity cost. People actually believe that by paying this extra cost, their homes can be individually identified as the electricity is distributed along the power lines along with all that dirty coal fired stuff, and selectively delivered only green power. Just across the other side of the river the CSIRO have a development that includes solar, gas and wind generation.
see their promotional video or is that propaganda video here.
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/p33s.asx
Power Grab says:
June 18, 2010 at 11:06 am
With respect to Richard S Courtney (June 18, 2010 at 4:06 am), I would like to add the following conjecture: Someone once told me that they believed the Great Wall of China was built to control commerce so taxes could be reliably collected.
We in Australia are told it was built by emperor Nasi Goreng to keep the rabbits out.
Anthony, welcome to The Land of Oz. Follow the Yellow Brick Road to irony;
I’m surprised you saw (and photographed for proof) that thing actually turning! There’s a swag of ’em out in west Victoria on hilltops where throughout a week of driving past every day, with more than enough wind to power them, only 20% were in working order. The rest were idle (maybe rusted due to poor Chinese maintenance/parts). Our taxes are also subsidising the ones that DON’T work..
I’m depressed.
WordPress compressed my posting into nothing.
There goes another hour of my life.
Reply Rescued: RT – Mod
Reasonable comeback Roger; however you’ve missed out the 2 most important points: cost and if AGW is baloney why suffer the cost and inefficiencies. Ask a Spaniard.
So to with nuclear; what are the disadvantages, noting that the French, the most complaining culture on Earth, have ‘endured’ nuclear for 40 years.
Wind turbines are okay.
But;
It must show it is competitive in a free marked. If subsidies is neccessary, that in itself is proving its just not competitive.
No arguments are needed. Why use time discussing the price of eggs? Why discuss price on electricity? Let the marked, i.e. the vote of every consumer handle it. Automatically.
Dont involve politics in it. Let the consumer vote. Via the electricity bill.