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.
It is indeed a shame that we knew of these alternative energy deficiencies in the 1950-70 period, when the USA was pricing how competitive nuclear was.
It is also a shame that in Oz, where I live, we have a ban on nuclear power and huge subsidies for windmills and solar and even geothermal???
In Victoria, we are building a desalination plant whose future seems to be windmill power as we close down an abundance of coal fired plants. But, the drought has broken and the dams are full, yet the owners of the desal plant will be paid for water whether they produce it or not (like virtual water?). What does one do with the desal water? The best suggestion I can imagine it to pipe it to the headwaters of the rivers from whence it came, so allow the wildlife to prosper downstream.
You can read this happy ending to your small children to send them off to sleep. I’m sure that some teachers believe that would be good.
Kum Dollison,
how come imaginary Chinese trains go east-west whereas imaginary US trains go north-south?
Would a shorter part of the same route provide a better comparison? Or better still, numbers, for folk outside the US who have no real idea where these cities are?
crosspatch says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:08 pm
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…..”
–/——————————
You are right about this. At current solar panel efficiencies if you covered all of New York City in solar panels, you wouldn’t have nearly enough power to cover current usage. Solar at this point cannot replace current energy sources. But like all new technology, you have to “get into the game” at some point and the improvements will follow. People had major criticisms of the automobile. They had little power, were noisy, broke down a lot, and really weren’t better than horse and buggy at the time. No infrastructure existed for the auto but plenty was in place for horses. Over time we know how that turned out!
The mines that produce the rare-earth elements for the wind generator magnets are not operating in the US.
One more foreign dependence targeted to replace that foreign oil dependence.
The oil is cheaper, and China is going to cut back on exports of REE.
Somebody should tell the Australian utility AGL how cost effective alternative power is.
/sarc off
Home solar scales down so even the little guy can get in on the scam. The federal and state government through taxes paid by your friends & neighbors help pay the lion’s share to purchase and install the solar power system. In addition, every time the sun shines your friends and neighbors throw money at you via additional taxes and electric rate increases. Solar power truly scales the racket down!
Kum Dollison: your assessment of coal reserves is way off. Or should I say coal “resources”, because it only counts as a “reserve” if the mine is open. There is ten times more coal in the ground than oil (all forms) and gas put together. If you look on Wikipedia it says the UK has only about 30 years coal reserves. But back in the late 70’s they used to tell us there was 450 years -so which is right? The clue is in the second sentence -it only counts as a reserve if the mine is still open !
World-wide there is about 9000 years of coal resource.
When oil is genuinely running out (rather than just at the whim of speculators like now), it will become economic to switch from oil to coal once again. Anything that can be made from oil can also be made from coal. Peak Oil -Pah 🙂
Vive la France! Just crank out the nuclear power stations like there’s no tomorrow and say “[snip] you” to the greenies. They may be arrogant but I reckon they’re right (from an Australian that’s never visited France, no less).. 😉
Neither wind nor solar work very well and neither will win. We can’t command a sunny day nor the wind to blow. And we still can’t store AC power! Until we can change one of those 3 things that we can’t do, wind and solar are just useless toys to dawdle with.
steveta_uk says:
October 14, 2010 at 2:28 am
I saw that programme. Grand Designs is brilliant. My heart went out to the chap and his partner, because you could see they really believed in what they were doing, and they put their money where their mouth was. What I’ll never understand is why he didn’t run the curve of the building so that the wide side faced South.
Most forms of power are subsidised at some point. Windpower has its place and will inevitably have teething problems.
In the late 80s a wind and hydro plant was designed for the Isle of Lewis (Scotland UK). A long loch with a natural constriction half way along its length was to be dammed and the windmills were to pump water up to one end to cover for the very few windless periods and the many excessively windy ones. As a successful but retired aeronautical/ structural/ nuclear engineer my father did all the preliminary design work and presented it to the Govt for free but they opted for a cable from the mainland to replace the existing diesel generator.
He was a man of numbers and facts and frequently came up against the egos of people with political agendas. Many of his thoroughly researched ideas ran foul of people who simply did not have the technical understanding to make a balanced decision.
His view of wind power was that it would never be a replacement for large centralised power stations but that it was a sensible addition in a world where fossil fuels were finite and energy demands steadily growing.
Windmills couple well with hydro pump storage because of the high proportion of off-line hours each day.
Likewise, nuclear couples well with pump storage bcos it needs to run 24/7. Google Dinorwig Hydro in Wales. It uses otherwise spare night-time power from Wylfa Head (nuc) and paid itself off in about a dozen years.
It’s not a case of one or the other, good or bad. All things have their place.
@Patrick:
Well, way to cherrypick data! For a start, if you take the capacity from the same source as generation figures, that’s 2430MW, not 5000MW from “the renewable website” whatever that is. So you’ve already artificially halved the supposed “efficiency” number.
Which is… well, rubbish, really. Efficiency, where I studied, meant the ratio of energy put in to useful energy got out and has nothing to do with capacity to generation ratios. Why do so many people in this thread find it so hard to understand that wind power requires wind? It’s rather like saying that coal power stations are inefficient because if you don’t put any coal in you don’t get any energy out…
Don’t get me wrong: Wind is unpredictable. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, and sometimes it doesn’t. Blaming windmills for that is stupid. You ought to ask, instead, if wind energy is cheaper than other forms, both in £ and GHGs, how much you are about either of them, and then which energy supply you are going to use. There is an almost constant refrain in skeptic circles that “in Europe, when the wind blows it forces spot energy prices negative!” Like somehow this is a bad thing? When the wind blows, wind energy is so cheap that the spot price is effectively zero (negative once subsidies come into operation). This directly lowers your power bill.
There are undoubtedly problems with all of the “renewable” energy sources: the sun doesn’t shine, the waves are still, the wind doesn’t blow, the tides turn. So, if you want to do something thoroughly worthwile for the world and make yourself utterly filthy rich in the process, find and patent a way to make this chemical reaction happen synthetically and efficiently:
CO2 + 2H2O + energy -> CH4 + 2O2
Or just about any similar variant. For those who don’t understand yet, I’m saying find a way to efficiently take carbon dioxide, water and sunlight and produce fossil fuels. Snarky comments about all the ones already in the ground aren’t helpful here.
There is a simple fact: we haven’t yet found a fuel as good as oil. It is dense, it is easy to carry and store, it is safe and it can be used in anything from a camp stove to a 1000MW electricity generator. It is really remarkable stuff. And it is just made up from carbon dioxide and water. Trees can make the stuff using air, water and sunlight, but they are not very efficient at it (only a few percent of incident sunlight is captured). So go find a catalyst and apparatus that makes it, say, 50% efficient. That’s already better than most PV cells, and you can use the stuff after the sun goes down.
I knew wind power was in big trouble when T. Boone Pickens walked away- at huge losses- from it.
Kum Dollison says:
October 14, 2010 at 3:00 am
We’re all big kids here, you can give it to us straight, in Kwh.
While I live in New England, I haven’t been to Oklahoma, so I’m not
sure how far it is between the East Coast to Oklahoma City. You might
also want to be a bit more explicit about exactly where “the East Coast”
I wonder how many motorists would get blocked by a train that stretched
from Maine to Oklahoma. Or how many locomotives it would need. Or what
the rationale is for placing all coal fired power plants in Oklahoma.
Oh, I got it, there’s a shipping port there for China. Wouldn’t Los Angeles
make more sense?
Sorry, every so often a cute analogy rubs me the wrong way.
“PV is kept alive by the extremely stupid und costly German subsidies, financing more than half of the world market.
The payments per kWh are much higher for solar than for wind energy because it is so much more expensive, trying to inverse or ridicule the laws of economics.”
Here’s the big difference: Solar, being based on semiconductors, etc, has a lot of headroom to become much more efficient over time. Wind doesn’t. It’s based on ancient technology and any improvements are going to be modest at best. It’s concievable that a multi-layer plastic film based solar cell grid will get up to 80% efficiency, making it cheap to install and a good use of land. Wind is never going to get there. Subsidizing solar can give it the breathing room it needs to improve. Subsidizing wind is pointless except as a political statement.
@Olaf Koenders; (Yes)
France has the right idea, nuclear from either uranium or thorium is the way to go, coal is to dirty. Wind and solar are niche and will never be reliable enough for industrialized nations.
John Knowles:
At October 14, 2010 at 4:56 am you assert:
“Most forms of power are subsidised at some point. Windpower has its place and will inevitably have teething problems.”
Say what!? “Teething problems”?
Wind power has been used for centuries. Wind energy powered most of the world’s shipping for thousands of years. Primitive wind turbines powered pumps (notably in the Netherlands and England) and mills throughout Europe for centuries.
There are a number of types of wind turbines. They are divided into Vertical-Axis and Horizontal-Axis types.
Vertical-axis windmills to mill corn were first developed by the Persians around 1500 BC, and they were still in use in the 1970’s in the Zahedan region. Sails were mounted on a boom attached to a shaft that turned vertically. The technology had spread to Northern Africa and Spain by 500 BC. Low-speed, vertical-axis windmills are still popular in Finland because they operate without adjustment when the direction of the wind changes.
The horizontal-axis wind turbine was invented in Egypt and Greece around 300 BC. It had 8 to 10 wooden beams rigged with sails, and a rotor which turned perpendicular to the wind direction. This type of wind turbine later became popular in Portugal and Greece. Around 1200 AD, the crusaders built and developed the post-mill for milling grain. The turbine was mounted on a vertical post and could be rotated on top the post to keep the turbine facing the wind.
This post-mill technology was first adopted for electricity generation in Denmark in the late 1800’s. The technology soon spread to the U.S. where it was used to pump water and to irrigate crops across the Great Plains.
During World War I, some American farmers rigged wind turbines to each generate 1 kW of DC current. Such wind turbines were mounted on buildings and towers.
But wind power was generally abandoned when the greater energy intensity available in fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine.
Today, if wind power were economically competitive with fossil fuels, then oil tankers would be sailing ships.
So, if wind power is having “teething problems” then how many centuries have to pass before the steam engine overcomes its “teething problems”?
Richard
P.S.
Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird swatters that produce no useful electricity and make no significant reduction to emissions but threaten electricity cuts. If you want to know why then read my item at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
===============
I agree with Kate (post 12:35 hrs) that we are throwing away billions simply because the politicians are too vain to admit that they have been stupid and duped. They cannot afford to loose face. For example Ed Milliband is now leader of the UK Labour party (the main opposition party) and whilst he was a government minister responsible for energy, he has long promoted wind farms deriding all those who objected as social misfits/trouble makers. He can’t afford to put up his hands and admit that wind farms are obviously inefficient and do not save the planet.
As far as the UK is concerned, it is obvious that solar is useless – the northern latitude makes the incidence of the sun weak and teh UK generally has a wet and cloudy climate. In the UK there is little aircon and hence peak energy is winter evenings when the sun simply does not shine. If there was any doubt, Germany has shown that solar does not work for northern latitude countries.
Wind is hopelessly unreliable. As Patrick notes it is presently delivering about 3% of its rated output. Last winter for the best part of a month, wind generation only produced between 3% to 8% of its rated power (for about 20 days it was down to between 2-3% of rated power). Had the UK been reliant upon wind for electricity, millions of people would have died since there would have been power cuts with electricity being rationed to about 1.5 hours a day. Homes would be without heat for 22.5 hours a day since electricity is required even if one has oil or gas fired central heating to run ignition and power circulating pumps etc. OK, so last winter was extreme; worst for 30 years. However, no sensible government can adopt an energy policy which condemns millions to their death every 20 or 30 years. The experience of last winter should have proved to Ed Milliband how stupid his energy policy was (he was at the time the government minister for energy) and should have convinced him of the stupidity of wind. Unfortunately there is no one as stupid as a politician and no one as dangerous as an arrogant fool (and these guys are arrogant thinking that they know best).
Simpleseekerafterthetruth hits the issue on the nail, has there been any reduction in CO2 emissions because of the adoption of wind farms. The answer is of course NO. Research has established that due to the variable nature of wind, one has to employ conventional power generators at 90% level as back up. That means as a best case scenario, wind farms could be capable of reducing CO2 emissions by 10% but no more. However, a lot of CO2 is used in the production, transportation and installation of wind farms. In particular, vast amounts of concrete are required as foundations. When this is taken into account and the additional power used to heat lubricating fluids in extreme cold and/or to back power the units when wind levels are inappropriate, there has been no saving of CO2 emissions.
Has any conventional generator been decommissioned as a consequence of building wind farms. NO, of course not. If there was the slightest doubt as to the usefulness of wind energy one only needs to look at the Danish experience which establishes that nothing has really been gained by their experiment with wind energy (and they are a flat and windy country).
Anyone with even modest intelligence could readily see that as far as the UK is concerned that the only green renewable energy source which might have legs is tidal and yet this is the one source which is least explored. Tells you everything about politicians.
The UK will soon face blackouts as the Labour party failed to address the UK’s future energy needs (which in any event is very under-estimated in view of the deliberate under-estimate of population change – it only now becoming apparent that we will hit 90 million in 30 to 40 years time). We badly need to build a lot of nuclear power plants – which are the best form of low CO2 energy, or just come to our senses and realise that CO2 is not the climate driver that warmist suggest that it is.
Golf Charley says:
“…Is it wrong to enjoy looking at photos of these wretched beasts self destructing?”
… Certainly not! I wish the whole global warming fraud would also self-destruct.
Renewable energy is back to front. I was staggered to find that offshore wind gets twice the subsidy that onshore does. Why? Because its much more expensive. Similarly, the Feed-In Tariff for small renewable generation gives a larger subsidy the less economic the technology. It is a flawed design. The subsidy is back-calculated to give a rate of return that means it will be built.
Incredible.
Imagine paying your worst worker the most money, the worst restaurant the biggest tip, the most incompetent doctor the largest pension. I’m not against paying for renewable generation, but I am against my money being spent so stupidly.
Spend my money on the cheapest way to get the most MWh renewable. The current system is designed to do the opposite.
~~~~~~~~~~
The Numbers
Up to 40% of all the UK’s electricity will have to be generated by renewable sources within ten years – and most of that will be wind-generated.
By law, 10% of the electricity sold by energy companies must come from “green” sources this year. The figure rises to 15% by 2015.
At present, 20% of a typical fuel bill – or £200 – is used to subsidise “green” energy, up from 8% two years ago.
Fuel bill payers would continue to subsidise offshore wind until at least 2025.
Number of wind turbines to be built by 2020: 10,000.
Lifespan of the turbine: 25 years.
Weight of a single turbine and tower: 70 tons.
Amount of time a wind-farm actually generates electricity: 35%.
Cost of 100 wind-farms: £780 million.
Cost of 6,400 offshore wind turbines to be built by 2020: £75 billion.
Of the 239 UK wind-farms operating in 2009, 129 ran at less than 25% capacity.
The average efficiency of all the turbines was 21%.
The worst-performing wind-farm in Northumbria was 4.9% efficient in 2009.
One turbine running at 30% capacity generates £283,088 subsidy per year.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More than half of Britain’s wind-farms have been built where there is not enough wind.
You might have thought that when building a wind-farm, you should look for a site that is quite windy. But more than half of Britain’s wind-farms are operating at less than 25% capacity. In England, the figure rises to 70% of onshore developments. Europe’s biggest wind-farm, Whitelee, near Glasgow, boasts 140 turbines which last year ran at less than 25% of capacity. Experts say that over-generous subsidies mean hundreds of turbines are going up on sites that are simply not breezy enough.
Britain’s most feeble wind-farm is in Blyth Harbour in Northumberland, where the nine turbines lining the East Pier reach a meagre 4.9% of their capacity. Another at Chelker reservoir in North Yorkshire operates at only 5.3% of its potential, the analysis of 2009 figures provided by energy regulator Ofgem found. The ten turbines at Burton Wold in Northamptonshire have been running for just three years, but achieved only 19% capacity.
The revelation that so many wind-farms are under-performing will be of interest to those who argue that they are simply expensive eyesores. Michael Jefferson, the professor of international business and sustainability who carried out the analysis, says financial incentives designed to help Britain meet green energy targets are encouraging firms to site their developments badly.
Under the controversial “Renewable Obligation” scheme, British consumers pay £1billion a year in their fuel bills to subsidise the drive towards renewable energy. Turbines operating well under capacity are still doing well out of the scheme, but Professor Jefferson, of the London Metropolitan Business School, wants the cash to be reserved for the windiest sites. He said: “There is a political motivation to drive non-fossil fuel energy, which I very much respect, but we need more focus”. He suggests that the full subsidy be restricted to turbines which achieve capacity of 30% or more – managed by just eight of England’s 104 on-shore wind-farms last year. Those that fall below 25% should not be eligible for any subsidy. Professor Jefferson said: “That would focus the mind to put them in a sensible place”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Add £60 to energy bills for wind-farms upgrade, says watchdog.
Households will have to pay an extra £60 in bills to cover the cost of connecting wind-farms and other renewable energy sources to the National Grid, the industry regulator warned today.
– Notice that this is just for CONNECTING wind-farms to the National Grid!
Energy bills will almost certainly have to increase, according to Ofgem. It says about £32 billion needs to be spent on modernising the networks over the next decade, more than twice the amount invested in the past 20 years.
This will have to be funded in part by consumers, who are already facing likely rises in gas and electricity supply tariffs early next year. The cost of building the “green networks” will have to be added to bills at a rate of about £6 a year from 2013, Ofgem said.
Most of Britain’s National Grid was constructed at least half a century ago and connects power stations to the major centres of population. But it doesn’t serve well the more remote locations where wind-farms and other renewable infrastructure is being built to meet government targets on greenhouse gas emissions.
Tom Lyon, energy expert at comparison website uSwitch.com, said: “This is about having an energy system that comes with a hefty price tag and mounting concern over who should be footing the bill. Much of the network that we rely on is from the Fifties and Sixties and can’t keep up with increased demand. In addition to this, we need to plan for the future and establish connections to new and offshore wind-farms and nuclear power plants in remote locations.”
Ofgem spokesman Chris Lock said: “Our energy system needs a huge revamp. It was designed for a time when power was distributed from a small number of power stations to homes across the country. But now we have renewable sources on-stream that are based in remote parts of Britain, and we need serious investment to connect them up, as well as build in the new smart meters and other green devices and re-engineer the way the grid works. It will mean increases in customer bills, but it’s a fair increase given the challenges networks face.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To answer your question about the Thanet wind-farm:
The first all-too-common mistake in the glowing coverage accorded to the inauguration of this Thanet wind-farm is to accept unquestioningly the claims of the developer, Vattenfall, about its output. The array of 100 three-megawatt (MW) turbines, each the height of Blackpool Tower, will have, it was said, the “capacity” to produce 300MW of electricity, enough to “power” 200,000 (or even 240,000) homes.
This may be true at those rare moments when the wind is blowing at the right speeds, but the wind is intermittent, and the average output of these turbines will be barely a quarter of that figure. The latest official figures on the website of Mr Huhne’s own department show that last year the average output (or “load factor”) of Britain’s offshore turbines was only 26% of their capacity.
Due to its position, the wind-farm’s owners will be lucky to get, on average, 75MW from their windmills, a fraction of the output of a proper power station. The total amount of electricity the turbines actually produce will equate to the average electricity usage not of 240,000 homes, but of barely half that number.
A far more significant omission from the media reports, however, was any mention of the colossal subsidies this wind-farm will earn. Wind energy is subsidised through the system of Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs), unwittingly paid for by all of us through our electricity bills. Our electricity supply companies are obliged to buy offshore wind energy at three times its normal price, so that each kilowatt hour of electricity receives a 200% subsidy of £100.
This means that the 75MW produced on average by Thanet will receive subsidies of £60 million a year, on top of the £30-40 million cost of the electricity itself. This is guaranteed for the turbines’ estimated working life of 20 years, which means that the total subsidy over the next two decades will be some £1.2 billion. Based on the costings of the current French nuclear programme, that would buy 1 gigawatt (1,000MW) of “carbon-free” nuclear generating capacity, reliably available 24 hours a day – more than 13 times the average output of the wind-farm.
The 100 turbines cost £780 million to build, which means that the £100 million a year its owners hope to earn represents a 13% return on capital, enough to excite the interest of any investor. And these turbines are only the first stage of a project eventually designed to include 341 of them, generating subsidies of £1 billion every five years.
A final claim for the Thanet wind-farm (which Mr Huhne boasts is “only the beginning”) is that it will create “green” jobs – although the developers say that only 21 of these will be permanent. These are thus costing, in “green” subsidies alone, £3 million per job per year, or £57 million for each job over the next 20 years. The Government gaily prattles about how it wants to create “400,000 green jobs”, which, on this basis, would eventually cost us £22.8 trillion, or 17 times the entire annual output of the UK economy.
John Knowles said: “It’s not a case of one or the other, good or bad. All things have their place.”
I agree SO LONG AS, things having their place is decided by free men and women making free choices of what is best for them. So in the USA Northeast natural gas which is local and plentiful and transportable on existing infrastructure should win for electricity generation and home heating and probably replace diesel for heavy duty transport. In the earthquake free USA Midwest Nuclear/coal makes the most sense, the southwest solar will provide more than anywhere else. Texas/Florida is oil/natural gas. california is just SOL. The article is right that solar will “win” over wind but in this case winning means 4-5% total use over 2-3% total use for wind. Both of their places is limited by market pricing realities. Just look at GE; GE is trying to refocus itself as an industriaal company again, wind turbines was a cheap easy way to get back to manufacturing IF they could get huge gov’t subsidies. So GE backed Obama and the Dems for Cap/Trade. That’s blown up, so GE is on to solar.
If people believe that the numbers can work for wind power…
Go here: http://ontariowindperformance.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/table-of-contents/
After you look at the analysis feel free to explain why the numbers don’t work. Start with “Powering Ontario” to get a perspective then look at the detail. The numbers used are the numbers collected by the power companies. The analysis is kept as simple as possible . So far nobody from the regulatory agencies of Ontario, nor anybody from a wind power company has bothered to challenge the results and analysis. Note that some “Wind Farms” are closer to 10% capacity factor than the 30% number that is bandied about.
Content is added as analysis is completed for each new subject.
I just completed my annual inquiry with local installers on the cost of a PV system for our home. Initial estimate is $6/W(peak), using panels for which the installer pays about $2/W(peak). If solar panels are free ($0/W), the system cost will still hover around $4/W(peak). With no subsidies or tax credits (or taxes on the delivered energy as with fossil fuels), the payback period here in Florida for free solar panels is 20 years.
I’m doing a detailed analysis of wind up here in Ontario. Best word to describe it is pathetic.
OntarioWindPerformance.wordpress.com
Here is what happens when the people rise up against wind. My local government
thinks wind is just nifty, the locals who have to live with it -dont:
http://www.friendsofgranderondevalley.com/
Split Atoms, not Eagles…