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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James Sexton says:
First, consider the cost of making, building and installing the windmills. Consider the life expectancy of the windmills. Understand, that for every windfarm constructed, one also has to make, build, install and maintain a gas(most expensive form of traditional generation) fired generation plant to be able to generate when the wind doesn’t blow or the wind blows too hard.
There’s also the issue of maintenance. In a conventional power station you don’t have precision moving parts outside on the top of tall masts. (Even for wind farms on land immunity to motion sickness can be a job requirment.)
You certainly don’t have lots of fairly small generators spread over a large area and it’s perfectly possible to have cranes installed within the plant. If you have a wind farm you need mobile cranes available.
If you are going to have to build a regular power plant anyway it makes far more sense to use fission, even coal, to generate the steam to run it. Then use money which dosn’t need to be spent on building and maintaining lots of windmills to do some combination of more generating capacity, improving existing transmission lines, cheaper electricity.
David L. says:
Nothing is stopping anyone from putting sails on cargo ships. Why don’t we do it? Cheaper than oil right? Maybe because we got tired of sailing for 6 months just to get across the Atlantic. And tired of getting stuck in the doldrums for weeks at a time. And not being able to get out of the path of storms.
Nothing stops a ship having both sails and a propeller/thrusters. Something you can find on yachts. I guess the potential fuel savings don’t justify the costs of sails.
Mark:
At October 17, 2010 at 8:38 am you write:
“Nothing stops a ship having both sails and a propeller/thrusters. Something you can find on yachts. I guess the potential fuel savings don’t justify the costs of sails.”
Your “guess is correct”.
Today, if wind power were economically competitive with fossil fuels, then oil tankers would be sailing ships. Japan has conducted several studies to ascertain if use of automated sails could assist modern shipping. These studies have demonstrated that available wind power is so small a contribution to the powering of a ship that the systems to obtain it cannot recover their capital costs.
Richard
Sorry if this comment is a bit scattered – I started writing it in Helsinki, make more progress in Copenhagen and I’m finishing it in Bristol.
@Craig Goodrich: Er, if you say so. And it is just you saying so, since the link is just to your website where you provide no evidence and quite an array of very inaccurate statements.
@Vince Causey: I’m not sure why the labelling practices of food processors is relevant to how windmills operate? If they work like that, then no, that’s not very helpful. But if I Google “Vestas Turbine Models” for instance, the first hit is a list of about twenty common turbine models, each of which lists power output and… oh, look, rated wind speed.
@richard Courtney: The issues here are more complex than you make out. You assume that wind output is both completely unregulated and completely unpredictable. Neither is true. Grid destablisation is partly dealt with by grid operators enforcing appropriate grid codes. These typically specify a maximum rate of change of output from a wind farm. The farm operator has to show that they can comply with this before they are connected to the grid. Windmills don’t just convert whatever energy is present to electricity – the output is completely controllable below this limit (at least for any large, modern turbine – anything over 1MW rated). The inevitable question is “what about when the wind drops suddenly?” The answer is that it doesn’t. Windmills don’t operate in cluttered, gusty environments. They operate in largely laminar wind flows and the changes are always fairly slow. They are also predictable. It is very easy to forecast a windmill’s output to within 10% a few hours in advance, and fairly easy a couple of days in advance (we do this commercially and people think it’s worth paying for).
And I’d add my $0.02 to the costs debate. The cost of constructing onshore wind turbines in the UK is about £800 per kW. The operation & maintenance costs are abount £16 per kW over 20 years. If you assume a capacity factor of 27% (on the low end), that the construction is fully funded by debt at an interest rate of 10% (rather high just now) to be payed back over ten years, this gives you an energy price of 5.35 p/kWhr. The wholesale price of electricity has hovered around 6.5p/kWhr for the last year. So the payoff period for such a turbine is actually just over eight years. So, over the 20-year life of the turbine, nearly twelve years of operation are pure profit, or about £1800 profit per kW of capacity, or about 225% profit over 20 years. I just thought the “expensive white elephant” debate could do with some real numbers. The figures are sourced from the UK SDC report Wind Power in the UK. The report is from 2005; I am assuming that improvements in turbine cost and inflation roughly cancel over that time. The report gives a range of numbers from various sources; I have taken the worst case for each number for onshore wind, and have required payoff in 10 years instead of 15 or 20 as the sources in the report assume. Of course, if you have cheaper construction (say £585 per kW, such as the Danish report), a better capacity factor (the UK is probably better than most in the report, probably nearer 35%), cheap capital (say 5% effective interest) and are happy to pay it off over the 20-year life of the turbine, then the electricity costs 1.5 p/kWhr and you can pay it off in under five years. Decommissioning is a non-issue for costs – you don’t usually tear them down, you replace them with newer turbines (this is known as repowering and is already happening in the UK). This is cheaper than construction on a greenfields site (no grid connection, the foundation is probably reusable, the tower material can be sold as scrap, the generator can be reconditioned and resold etc etc etc) so wind gets cheaper the second time around on a site.
Tom,
Wind is predictable? Really?
Loss of Wind Causes Texas Power Grid Emergency (Reuters)
Wind energy supply dips during cold snap (The Daily Telegraph, UK)
@Poptech – yes, really. Note the following points from the articles you cite, please:
1. Neither article mentions whether the drops were forecast or not, but both imply that they were (see points 3 and 4).
2. Although the Texas grid operator cut some customers, this was not because demand exceeded supply, but because reserve supply fell below some threshold and created the risk that demand might exceed supply.
3. Despite the headline, the Texas cuts were not caused by wind: “multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday,” that is, the wind drop was forecast and other suppliers were scheduled to make up the shortfall – but those other suppliers didn’t deliver what they’d promised, causing the dip in supply.
4. The drop in wind in the UK did not cause any supply interruption, ie. it was successfully forecast and the shortfall made up.
Tom,
Now you are getting desperate,
1. No where is it mentioned that it was predicted. If this was predicted wouldn’t ERCOT mention this? Why would they withhold something to make themselves look bad?
2. Fact: Large industrial customers lost 1,100 megawatts of power for an hour and a half due to the FAILURE of WIND POWER.
“ERCOT said the grid’s frequency dropped suddenly when wind production fell from more than 1,700 megawatts, before the event, to 300 MW when the emergency was declared.”
3. “…That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas” <- Why are you omitting this? It doesn't say who those "multiple suppliers" are, they could be more wind power!
4. "…sources in the energy industry say that the lack of wind has caused the country's wind farms to grind to a halt when more electricity than ever is needed for heating, forcing the grid to rely on back up from fossil fuels”
You have failed to provide any evidence that it was predicted.
Tom Fuller wants to know which will win – solar or wind energy. I say pox on both of their houses. Why are we even talking about that? Because there is a global warming movement that wants to control carbon dioxide emissions to prevent a global warming catastrophe. Fuller evidently thinks there is something to that. The case against carbon dioxide was tainted from the start. It began with a huge public relations coup when Hansen stood up in front of more than ten television cameras and pronounced that global warming had started and that carbon dioxide we were putting into the air was the cause. The year was 1988. I have determined from satellite records that was no warming whatsoever in the eighties and nineties. Furthermore, temperature records that show warming in this time slot are falsified and I show how that was done. Which makes that testimony of Hansen’s in front of the Senate false. I wouldn’t actually care if the warming advocates had not succeeded in convincing governments to take actions based on this false science to protect us against an imaginary danger. The actions and proposals for further actions would make our economies worse and lower the living standard of each of us as an individual, all for nothing. These fanatics are more than incredible: Hansen so hates carbon dioxide that now he calls trains that transport coal to power stations for burning “death trains.” Not only are the data upon which their claims of warming rest cooked, their science is also wrong. Ferenc Miskolczi has shown that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs has been constant for the last 61 years. Which means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years has not had any influence on the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation from below. This is an empirical observation based on NOAA database going back to 1948 and not a deduction from theory. It overrides any theoretical calculations that do not agree with it, and I specifically mean Arrhenius theory. It should be obvious by now to any real climate scientist that the IPCC boast that the “science is settled” is not settled at all and that they need to go back to the drawing boards.