Guest post by Tom Fuller
Something went terribly wrong with wind power. Preached to us all as a solution to climate change, it fell apart in one year. Some have blamed it all on the recession, ignoring the fact that other renewable energy sources and energy efficiency strategies have continued to grow.
I say it’s the business model. Wind power companies sell either to utilities or governments. There is insufficient pressure on them to lower costs–and indeed, during wind power’s moment of glory last year, prices went up 9%. Wind power companies are almost all divisions of large conglomerates, such as GE, or energy distributors such as utilties themselves. Wind power for some providers seems like a vanity entry into a PR sweepstakes–but there is no scope for reducing margins or searching frantically for innovative cost reductions.
And so their moment has passed, maybe permanently. While wind power tried to dictate terms to their captive clients (too often successfully), the cost of solar power and natural gas continued to fall, to the point where nobody could make a straight-faced case for wind as a competitive technology, and certainly not the offshore wind farms that are the new rage. Rage as in what customers will feel when they see their bills…
It hasn’t helped that the inefficiency of wind’s performance has been gleefully highlighted by those opposed to its expansion. If a turbine says it will give you 1 MW of electricity, you can only count on about a quarter of that being delivered. Maintenance issues are real, as are complaints about noise and bird kills. And they do take up a lot of space.
Contrast that with solar power companies. There are a lot more manufacturers, and they are increasing capacity continuously. Each new generation of fab provides 20% performance gains, and the next generation of wafers is longer, wider, thinner and less likely to break. Innovations for their balance of system peripherals come from a variety of outside companies in their supply chain, and the inexorable march to grid parity is nearing its goal.
They both get the same level of subsidies, which amount to a pittance overall. So what’s the difference?
Solar sells to consumers, too. Residential, small business, offices and plants. Solar scales down as well as up. And their customers are you and me–cranky and demanding if things don’t work, unwilling to sign long term contracts, wanting to see bottom line improvements rather than brochures showing acres of installations.
So solar will win. Not because they’re nicer guys, but because their industry is more fragmented and they have more demanding customers.
Which, I believe, is the way the system is supposed to work.
So, although government is not good at picking winners, it can identify losers, and should do so forthwith. Wind power sales have fallen through the floor this year, but the DOE should be making pretty stern announcements about price performance failures in the wind industry, and pointing out the advantages of alternatives to alternative power–not just solar.
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Interesting article except for all of that fulsome praise of wind power.
Lomborg has just been pretty scathing about Denmark’s experience with windmills:
“Denmark itself has also already tried being a green-energy innovator; it led the world in embracing wind power. The results are hardly inspiring. Denmark’s wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialised nation. Several studies suggest that claims that one-fifth of Denmark’s electricity demand is met by wind are an exaggeration, in part because much of the power is produced when there is no demand and must be sold to other countries.”
“So solar will win. Not because they’re nicer guys, but because their industry is more fragmented and they have more demanding customers.”
Chinese solar is doing fine.
The U.S. is having trouble competing.
http://tinyurl.com/3ywcd39
Another interesting article, Tom! I agree, wind was a bad idea back in the 70’s and even worse today. Natural gas is cleaning everybody’s clocks it seems.
Meanwhile, the ethanol “blend wall” has fallen with little fanfare:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9IR0NCO0.htm
Bjorn Lomborg on solar today:
“Being a pioneer is hardly a guarantee of riches. Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by E47 billion ($66bn) in subsidies. The lasting legacy is a massive bill and lots of inefficient solar technology sitting on rooftops throughout a cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1 per cent of its total energy supply.”
That’s a lot of loot for 0.1%, presumably there’re better ways to implement solar than this.
In practice also the cost of photovoltaic solar is the cost of big batteries, which do not easily reduce in price with R&D advances. In fact the sheer amount of material required for massive increases in battery capacity would increase the cost due to resource supply and demand.
“Solar sells to consumers, too. Residential, small business, offices and plants. Solar scales down as well as up. And their customers are you and me–cranky and demanding if things don’t work, unwilling to sign long term contracts, wanting to see bottom line improvements rather than brochures showing acres of installations.”
This is a good point. The ability to scale down as well as up is a massive advantage over wind. Indeed, I think solar struggles to scale up (certainly there are a few large solar farms, but not as many as wind). However, the ability to scale down to the actual consumer level is a huge difference. I see a dozen solar installations on roofs in my neighborhood, but no windmills. To be sure, there are rebates and tax credits and forced offsetting by the utility, etc., but without the scalability, none of these single-family sized installations would exist.
Solar also has the ability to scale even smaller: think of the cells you can buy now to charge your laptop or your phone or the ever ubiquitous solar calculator that has been around for years. There need to be some more significant efficiency gains in the industry, to be sure, but at least solar has a huge advantage over wind in terms of scalability, potential uses and markets. We’ll see where it shakes out, but I’m optimistic about solar.
Thomas, it’s nearly time to go get your own blog. Some of your stuff here is interesting, occasionally even insightful, but then stuff like this comes up. It is, very simply, ignorant.
The wind business is doing fine, thanks. We are still turning away business designing turbines because we can’t find enough engineers.
You get what it says on the can – a turbine rated at 1MW at 10.5 m/s wind speed (or thereabouts – specific turbines vary, but usually somewhere here). If you can’t see the relationship between how hard the wind is blowing and how much power you get…
And yet, somehow, people keep building them. In some places they have subsidies, in some places they don’t. It is not well known, but one of the places with the fastest rate of turbine construction is China. And if it ain’t cheap, it doesn’t happen there.
Partly true. Wind power companies sell to whoever is buying – just not many people have the space (or capital) to put one up. There are people trying to sell small ones to small customers – but they, I will readily agree, are a scam and little more. They don’t work.
Utter, ignorant, rubbish. Ten years ago, there were about thirty turbine manufacturers in the world. Today there are around seventy in China. You think that’s not pressure to lower costs?
Ten years ago, the absolute biggest turbine available was 1.5MW and most were 750kW and worked on the stall-regulated scheme. Today we are building 5-6MW machines using pitch regulation. There are good reasons for this difference (I can explain the control problems if people are really interested) – you can’t make a 6MW stall-regulated machine because it will fall over. And, guess what? As the machines get bigger, the costs per MW decrease. Significantly. This is known as innovation driving costs down. The fact that it seems not to be innovation in the direction you’d like to see (smaller, cheaper-per-unit turbines) is irrelevant.
Maybe. Or maybe until the sun goes down. Then you need to have something else. I’m not arguing that solar is irrelevant, just that your view of wind is ignorant (and seems particularly US-centric) and that a mix of renewables seems to be the way forward.
The major problem with solar is that it works ok where you have a space like a roof that is exposed to the sun and can be covered. But imagine you were to convert every single household to pure solar in California. That would account for about 8% of California’s energy consumption. In order to get any meaningful percentage, say 20% or more, you will need to plaster large areas of land with solar panels.
Placing a solar panel over hundreds or thousands of acres of land changes the climate between that panel and the surface. The surface of the soil is deprived of a lot of sunlight. The plants growing there are going to change and so will the wildlife. It might no longer be suitable for the native species. This is particularly true when those panels have to be cleaned to remove the dust, dirt, bird droppings, etc. that will naturally accumulate on them. That will take a good deal of water. That water is going to go into the soil again possibly changing the nature of what grows around those solar panels.
The bottom line is that solar is great for some applications but it can not compete with hydroelectric, for example. How much desert would one need to utterly destroy to power Las Vegas 24x7x365 and replace Hoover Dam?
People have little sense of scale and often don’t think about things beyond their own personal energy use. A single electric arc steel mill can require over 400MW of power. You would need to plaster the entire country with panels and there would be no room to grow food.
Well, it looks like Google is finding religion and T. Boone Pickens is looking for love in some other place.
http://www.tickerspy.com/newswire/?p=3360 says in part:
One thing that I think we miss in rating alt-energy is that solar and wind both have proven impractical in large, centralized plants and “farms”, but still useful when distributed among the power customers. Here in Southern Cal, we have a number of wind turbine “farms” and various kinds of solar electricity generation plants as well. They tend to require subsidies just to pay back the cost of building them.
If my need for solar / wind is simply to reduce my draw from the big, centralized utility, then efficiency levels that are not acceptable in centralized plants may be acceptable to me. My capital outlay will be many orders of magnitude smaller, and I may not be concerned with recapturing the investment.
It seems to me that the future of alternative energy is in the individual home and business, not in centralized generation facilities. Big utilities (and big government) don’t like that concept, because ultimately, it could reduce the need for their existence.
Yeah solar is good, but it must face north. I had some stupid installer not put it on the north face and I made them come back and fix it, the Kw output doubled!
We have a few windmills here in New Zealand.
They are very noisy. I don’t think the birds like them either.
There was a recent study of the power generation for the state of Colorado, which include the intergration of wind farms into their electricity grid system.
The report’s findings were not favourable at all for wind farms, which found that their part on the grid sytem caused more green house gasses to be generated by their coal fired power stations. This was found to be due to the cyclying of the coal fired systems due to the irratic nature of the wind.
It is called the Bentek report and well worth a look at if you are at al interested in the intergration of wind farms onto a national electricty grid.
I read in the past couple of weeks that all of the wind and solar generation combined today is equal to the power generation of Dayton, Ohio. So if you combined it all, you could power one small city in the US.
I could power a city the size of San Francisco (uses a peak of 900MW on the hottest day of the year) on a single AP1000 nuclear plant that takes up a relatively little space. By recycling the fuel, I could operate it for decades on one fuel load.
There is your “alternative” energy. No copper mines required, not smelters, no dead birds. Wind and solar are actually pretty dirty sources of power when you look at everything that goes into producing them.
The other issue that is not mentioned here is storage. Solar panels only work when the sun shines and windmills only work when the wind is blowing. I want my electrical power at 7 pm when the sun has set and the wind may not be blowing. Batteries can be used on small scale solar systems and the molten salt for solar thermal generation can be stored. What does a battery pack for a 1 MW windmill look like? How much does it cost? How long will it last?
Also, it is perfectly OK to burn fossil fuels for electrical power generation. CO2 does not cause climate change.
“If a turbine says it will give you 1 MW of electricity, you can only count on about a quarter of that being delivered.”
If a wind turbine says it will give you 1MW, it will, but only with enough wind, typical values for nominal power are around 10-12m/s wind speed.
Wind power obtained by a rotor or Radius R comes from the formula:
P=1/2*Cp*Dens*(pi*R²)*v³
It depends on Cp with a theretical maximun value of 16/27 according to Betz’ Law , which value basically depends on the blade shape.
But power output mainly depends on wind speed(v), If there is no wind then there is no power, that’s for sure, also If there is too much wind no power either (because there could be very high loads for which the wind turbine) but very few hours are WT’s are down because of high wind speed.
Good sites yield a mean annual wind speed around 7m/s, with that mean wind speed you have plenty of hours at nominal power.
Also uptime hours or availability is normally guaranteed by contract usually for 95% or more.
My personal cue that photovoltaic panels are not quite ready for prime time is the complete lack of retail stores and malls here in Southern California with installations at all, let alone installations that might impact the cost of lighting and cooling a major retailer. I figure that if it were cost effective, then Walmart would already be doing it. If Walmart were doing it, they would be bragging about it at every opportunity….
If they were going to be cost effective anywhere, the Southwest US is a good candidate. Lots of sunny days, lots of fair weather, and lots of rooftops that cover air-conditioned spaces that could use a little reduction in the cost of the peak price of electricity at the meter.
Since the peak load is still broad daylight, you don’t even need batteries to save money here.
Photo voltaic requires sun. Windmills require more than a breeze. Both require large land areas per MW compared to hydro/coal/gas/nuclear which themselves operate 24/7. They are not alternative forms of energy on a national scale and will never be more than supplemental because there always has to be back-up generation on-line for times of low & high wind speeds and no sun. All European solar/wind installations connected to grids have been government subsidised for installation and again for their outputs. No European conventional power stations have or can be decommissioned because ‘alternative’ energy is sufficient in their stead. If you have 20mins to spare, watch http://www.europesillwind.org/films/europes-ill-wind-2.html
after 1min 30secs for real experiences with ‘mills.
Let’s face it. Wind-power had been over-sold, over-hyped, and over-priced since the global warming fraud took off. The impracticality of littering entire landscapes and seascapes with these inefficient bird-shredders has been overtaken by a religious incantation citing “energy security”, “low carbon”, “natural power”, and a lot more. The upshot of all this has nothing to do with reliably supplying electricity but rather acting as a totem, a symbol, an icon, and a statement about how “green” are the politicians and activists who inflicted all this on the public in the name of “saving the planet”. We are now in the bind that for any politician to decry the wind-farms and list their limitations is to recant one’s belief in the whole global warming carbon-dioxide-is-evil religion, and admit you were stupid enough to be taken in by the scam in the first place.
Wind-farms are massively uneconomic, but their numbers will increase for no other reason than to save politicians’ faces. After all, they’re not paying for this out of their own pocket.
Here’s the latest pronouncement from on high about wind-farms:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Greenpeace predicts wind could provide 20% of world power by 2030
13 October 2010
Wind power could meet about a fifth of the world’s electricity demand within 20 years Greenpeace predicted yesterday.
The global market for wind power grew 41.7% on year in 2009, beating average annual growth of 28.6% over the past 13 years, said Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, or GWEC.
China ranked second in the world in installed wind generating capacity in 2009 and was the largest buyer of wind technology, Sawyer told reporters at the launch of GWEC and Greenpeace’s Global Wind Energy Outlook 2010 report. “We would expect China to continue to be the largest market and perhaps even be the (overall) largest market in the world by the end of this year. For more than the last 10 years, the actual performance of the wind industry has exceeded our advanced scenario every time,” said Sawyer.
When asked to compare China’s wind power industry to the US, Sawyer said Beijing was showing more leadership than Washington in alternative energy. “At the moment, the Chinese market has most of the advantages in the sense that there’s a clear and supportive policy framework and very clear government support for developing a domestic industry. Neither of those have really been the case in the United States.”
The report’s “advanced scenario” – its most optimistic outlook – projects the world’s combined installed wind turbines would produce 2,600 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity by 2020 – equal to 11.5 to 12.3% of power demand. By 2030, wind energy would produce 5,400 TWh – 18.8 to 21.8% of the world’s power supply, the report said.
The more conservative reference scenario based on figures from the UN’s International Energy Agency saw wind-power triple in the next decade to cover up to 4.8% of electricity – equal to Europe’s current total production.
The “moderate” scenario based on current industry figures would see wind power meet up to 9.5% of the world’s power demand by 2020, the report said. Under the advanced forecast, 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions would be saved each year, the report said. This would increase to 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 saved each year by 2030. The cumulative amounts of CO2 saved would be 10 billion tonnes by 2020 and 34 billion tonnes by 2030.
The total number of views ruined, birds shredded, and taxpayers extorted to pay for all this was not mentioned.
I am not aware of a single installation that has ever lived up to its claimed power production after installation. Do you know of any? The most common number I have seen is actual production at about 30% of the “capacity” rating that was used when the generation was sold to whoever bought it. The project in Minnesota was a total failure this past winter when the system delivered exactly 0 watts during one of the coldest periods in the state’s history and they sorely needed the power. The mechanism froze.
Get that? You have to expend energy to heat the hydraulic fluid so the windmill will work. It is hard to make things that work reliably in temperatures that often hit -30F and where you might have gale force winds, ice, and blowing snow. You going to put a solar heater on that thing … at night?
China is being cited as an example of good sense. But China is a different animal, central planning, rapidly expanding economy and insufficient energy supply is China’s problem. Non of those apply to Europe/USA. China is building coal-fired generation at a dizzy pace because they need increased capacity and will continue to need it to cover growth & ‘alternatives’ when they are not producing. Different scenario, different incentives, different society.
It’s my opinion that the solar panel and wind industries have more problems than most of the readers here are aware of. Until solar and wind power can be compared to conventional energy sources on a kw-hr vs kw-hr basis without the politics of “green is better”, there can be no adequate comparison. Someone has to factor in/out the subsidies to the manufacturers of solar and wind equipment, subsidies to the purchasers, and the unfair tax loading of our conventional energy producers.
Take the tax burden off coal production that the green energy sources aren’t expected to be burdened with; royalties, production taxes, ad-valorem, etc., take the tax burden off the power plants; take the tax burden off the rate payer; eliminate all extra charges that do not reflect the actual cost of energy production.
Then compare the cost of the kw-hrs produced between the “green is better” and the conventional energy producer.
In Colorado, the rate payer is subsidizing wind through increased conventional energy rates; what subsidy isn’t being paid by the rate payer is burdened onto industry in Colorado, which ends up being paid by the tax payer. Total scam.
The solution isn’t in subsidizing bad technology, it’s in funding proper research. All we are doing now is creating white elephants.
“They both get the same level of subsidies, which amount to a pittance overall. So what’s the difference?”
really?
nuclear and coal get taxes and punishing regulations, wind and solar get generous subsidies and the go ahead in the most improbable situations.
and which one realiably, day after day and night after night cranks out the bulk of the energy we need?
when subsidies dry out wind and solar will be quickly abandoned. i just hope we will have enough pitchforks available by then
“Tom” said: “You get what it says on the can – a turbine rated at 1MW at 10.5 m/s wind speed (or thereabouts – specific turbines vary, but usually somewhere here). If you can’t see the relationship between how hard the wind is blowing and how much power you get…”
Oh, please.
When my local power company commissions a new gas-fired 1200MW generator, then you “get what it says on the can”. 1200MW, 24/7. The actual usable power it produces. When a wind farm operator (while putting out their hand for taxpayer subsidy) commissions a new turbine, they (and the politicians supporting them) say “1MW capacity” without qualification.
When was the last time you saw a press release from a wind farm carpetbagger, in which the actual usable output from a wind farm was actually stated?
What it says on the can? Nothing. Not even an asterisk and fine print.
Can somebody explain to an interested layman why these things are suddenly called ‘turbines’
I always thought that a turbine had a way of enclosing the powering fluid and multiple consecutive vanes to take off the energy (eg gas turbine engine).
The ugly machines that are spreading across the once beautiful mountains of Central Scotland (eat your heart out Walter Scott) have neither of these characteristics. To my mind their basic technology is unchanged from about 1250 AD and they should still be called windmills.
Is the use of ‘turbine’ yet another way to fool the public into buying a very old and unsuccessful technology by rebranding it as up to date and dynamic?
Further reading : The Wind Farm Scam, by John Etherington. No connection whatsoever to me.