Would generating more electricity from wind really help poor families or the environment?
By Pastor Jay Dennis From CanadaFreePress.com
We Americans are often told we must end our “addiction” to oil and coal, because they harm the environment and Earth’s climate. “Ecologically friendly” wind energy, some say, will generate 20% of America’s energy in another decade, greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions and land use impacts from mining and drilling.
These claims are a driving force behind the cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy bills that Congress may try to ram through during a “lame duck” session – as well as the Environmental Protection Agency’s economy-threatening regulations under its ruling that carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare.”
It is true that we are commanded to be good stewards of the Earth and resources God gave us. We should conserve energy, use it wisely, and minimize harmful impacts on lands and wildlife. But we also need to safeguard our health and that of our neighbors, preserve jobs, and help poor families build wealth and improve their standard of living. I want all children, not just mine, to have a better future.
Heaven knows I’m not an engineer. But Robert Bryce’s readable book, “Power Hungry,” has opened my eyes and helped me appreciate what it really means to be good stewards – and why we depend on hydrocarbons for 85% of the energy that keeps our homes, businesses and communities running smoothly.
Bryce points out that we are no more “addicted” to fossil fuels than we are to food, housing and clothing. It’s simply that fossil fuels give us more abundant, reliable and affordable energy, from less land, than any alternatives we have today. They enable us to have jobs, hospitals, cars, schools, factories, offices, stores – and living standards better than royalty enjoyed a mere century ago. As fossil fuel consumption increases, so does agriculture, commerce, mobility, comfort, convenience, health and prosperity.
Oil, natural gas, coal and gasoline also give us huge amounts of energy from small tracts of land. One oil well producing just ten barrels a day provides the energy equivalent of electricity from wind turbines on half of Delaware, according to Bryce.
Wind-based electricity is unreliable. It’s available only when the wind is blowing enough but not too hard. It can add to our electrical grid, but can’t be depended on to power a business or operating room. And no factory or city can get by just on wind power – not in my lifetime, anyway. Wind as a primary or dominant energy source is simply a mirage.
Wind turbines actually generate electricity only seven hours a day on average – and 2 hours a day on sweltering Texas summer days and frigid Minnesota winter nights. That means every watt of wind power must be backed up by gas-fired generators that kick in every time the turbine blades stop turning.
And that’s just the beginning.
Wind turbine farms need ten times more steel and concrete than a nuclear, coal or gas power plant for the same amount of electricity. You also need thousands of tons of raw materials for the backup generators and the thousands of miles of new transmission lines to get the electricity to cities hundreds of miles from the wind farms. All these materials have to be dug out of the ground someplace.
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Swaffham in Norfolk, UK, has had a wind turbine for years. At windy times, it provides more electricity than the town needs, at other times, less. It makes little sense as an isolated, non-gridded generator, but as part of a national grid, it works because on average it produces the town’s requirement of electricity. Setting aside for a moment the energy cost of building it – because we can assume that will come down as the technology matures – it provides cheap power to the town, as well as being a point of interest in the landscape.
What it really shows is that any energy solution will require lots of different technologies, because some will work well in some places, and others will be more suitable for other locations. If the best way for Swaffham to generate electricity is with wind power, that doesn’t mean that Bristol can’t use tidal power from the Severn Bore. Neither provides a steady stream of power, but linked together with dozens of other systems, we can be reasonably sure of getting a consistent level.
Jack says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:11 pm
“Why isn’t the industrial storage of electrical energy a national priority?”
Because wind, solar, and other part time renewables are very expensive sources of energy already. When you add the expense of yet to be developed mass storage, the total cost of energy would be many times that of our current coal, NG or nuclear sources.
Why would we do that?
The planet is fine, it’s the people who are F@ed.
George Carlin.
From their own ignorance I might add.
Kum Dollison,
On what basis?
See Slide 4.
http://www.iea.org/speech/2010/Tanaka/iea_nea.pdf
Do you have different numbers?
Thanks, Pastor, for a very clear analysis of the inviability of wind power. Sounds very similar to the ethanol disaster. When I hear such I can’t help but think I am missing something because people in charge can’t be that stupid…can they? What am I missing?
Also I don’t understand how environmentalists can be such champions of something as ugly as wind farms. Is this what we are preserving our wilderness for? I guess there is a component of “beauty is as beauty does” in their mind and also some anti-establishment-ism .
Power generation should be as concentrated as possible so it can be out of sight. Small modern nuclear looks promising to me. We could learn a lot from the French who are way ahead of our stunted nuclear power industry.
Mike says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:48 pm (Edit)
JohnM: You are being paranoid. The “greenie” in the White House is pushing nuclear power.
Dead wrong. His administration is defeating ALL energy resource development and research – Except that which his political promotoers (Soros has bllions invested in Brazilian oil fields, and Obama has sent billions in US tax dollars to Brazil to support Brazil offshore drilling while US drilling in production wells in shallow water. BP? Supports his cap & tax. GE? The same. Duke? The same. Entergy? The same. His EPA, DOE, ERDA, NSRDC, NASA, etc, etc, etc, etc. are all opponents of energy development and ALL are hard-core enviro’s. Most have printed books and papers prefering plants and animals over people’s lives – prefering in their written words cases, to eliminate people to “save the plant”. Nuke energy? Ask who Reid (NV) got favors from to kill the waste fuel project.
The fringe eco groups aren’t going to have much say in what is done.
Dead wrong. The fringe eco groups control ALL the positions and power.
The advantage of C&T is that it uses market forces to direct investments to low carbon energy. This is better than government subsidies which depend on who has the best lobbyists rather they who has the best technology.
Dead wrong. Cap and tax will do nothing to “stop” global warming – less than 0.1 degree – IF it does anything at all. Cap and tax’s goal is to destroy the US economy – while raising 1.3 trillion in new taxes. It does NOTHING to lower global carbon emissions. And lowering carbon emissions does NOTHING to reduce the warming of the world that began 350 years ago – and will stop in 2070 regardless of what we emit.
(You see this all the time in the defence industry with companies lobbying for weapons systems the military does not want. Yet no one advocates privatizing the Pentagon.) Without C&T we will have to go the big government route like we do for national defence.
Dead wrong – and an illogical comparison in any case. Cap & tax is ONLY big government. With special favors for people who vote democrat. Did yo know that cap & tax AVOIDS taxing power plants in democratic congressional districts? It puts all the taxes on republican districts.
The consequences of continued in action are likely to be severe.
Dead wrong. The consequences of doing nothing are ….. nothing.
Jack says (October 20, 2010 at 5:11 pm): “It seems to be me, and I’m just spit balling here….but wouldn’t one, perhaps the only, way of solving the inherent problems of wind and solar power, is to develop an efficient storage device?”
Well, no, the best “solution” to using an intermittent power source is to use a proven steady power source instead, e.g. gas, coal, nuclear. Every conversion of energy from one form to another involves some loss, so it’s inherently more efficient to generate electricity when needed than to generate it when not needed and store it for later.
That said, pumped storage is pretty efficient where such facilities already exist, recovering some 75% of the original energy input. I understand Denmark sells its off-peak wind power to Norway and Sweden (pumping water back up existing hydro dams), then buys back hydro power when needed. Nevertheless, the Danes pay some of the highest electric rates in Europe. Theoretically wind/solar could generate hydrogen gas (methane would be better), which could be piped or (ugh) trucked where needed, but that adds the cost of gas generation and transportation to an already expensive investment. I just don’t see the point of trying to “solve” a “problem” that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The NWO creeps just want to be able to traeps around the entire planet wily nilly with their gobs of money, without interference from sovereign countries. That’s why they want a one world government. I think I hit the nail on the head.
The entire planet as their very own playground. That’s what the billionaires want.
They are billionaires, but the one thing they do not have in the entire world, is the entire planet as their playground, and they want it so bad for themselves. This is their holy grail. They are frustrated that they can’t have that right now. Screw them to their graves, they ain’t goin to get that one last thing they want, period.
All the Billionaires want the entire planet to traeps around on with their gobs of money, taking over whatever industry they can get their filthy hands on.
I’m sorry, I’m a little irate this evening.
“…a point of interest in the landscape” You are kidding right?
Jack says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:11 pm
“So, why aren’t we having a “Manhattan” type project to develop batteries?”
Inappropriate analogy. By the time the Manhattan Project got started, everyone knew the goal could be achieved – Fermi had lit off his pile. Affordable energy storage? Not so much. Nobody knows how to produce an inexpensive and long-lasting energy storage device from environmentally friendly materials. And, even if they did, you would still require thousands of square miles of land for the solar and wind installations, and that wouldn’t be very environmentally friendly, either.
Besides, no matter how hard you try to reduce our use of oil, you will still run into Jevon’s Paradox. That is, we might use different energy technologies along with oil, but never instead of it.
Jack 5:11pm:
I work for American Electric Power (AEP) at their only nuclear site. For the record, I speak for myself NOT AEP.
Batteries have existed almost since the discovery of electricity. The advancements in this area will be slow since in the final analysis a battery is nothing but a storage device for chemical energy and we have been using and researching this for decades. We have made incremental advancements in this area from alkaline to NiCd to NimH to Li-ion but this isn’t exactly a new science. Add to this that the scale of the problem is in the hundreds of megawatts range and I don’t think we will ever get there with what we today call “batteries”. AEP operates most of its generation in the pjm interconnection, they operate in the mid Atlantic and parts of the Midwest. On a normal day load in pjm will vary by 20,000 megwatts from peak load to min load, with a typical day varying from perhaps 70,000Mw min to 90,000Mw max. And this is just a small fraction of United States total load. On a hot day in summer it will vary by 60,000 megawatts or more in pjm. You can see all this at http://www.pjm.com. These wide swings in daily load represent plants that have to be sitting ready to start up if called upon to raise power to support the grid.
AEP does have a few installations using NaS (Sodium-Sulfur) batteries that are in the few megawatt range. I believe the largest one is 5Mw. These are installed to address specific issues at the distribution system level and seem to work well for this, although I am by no means an expert on these. They are pretty expensive, costing millions of dollars for a few Mw installation. In my opinion, the best form of “battery” at utility scale is pumped storage hydro generation. These plants fill a reservoir during off peak times and drain it, producing power, during on peak times. The suitable sites for this are limited though.
All this said, if you figure out a way to store electricity at Mw scales, let me know, we would both be fabulously wealthy. In addition, no one would need to build another power plant for decades. We would just operate the most economic ones we have at higher capacity factors.
Dave;
The value of your little S**ham windmill is utterly dependent on it being little, and having the whole grid to pick up wobbles in its output. As soon as you get to any significant portion of total demand, the nightmares begin. Cranking backups up and down — sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis — is horrifically expensive and maximizes “pollution”.
In any case, we are in a CO2 famine, and should, if anything, be subsidizing its production.
Jack, re Storage: Fossil fuels are pretty efficient at energy storage.
Kum Dollison says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:44 pm
‘Cost? Wind is already cheaper than Nuclear, and about the same price that Coal was when it Spiked in 2008. ‘
I am not sure where you are getting your info from but at best Wind is 149% more costly than coal. That ia with the massive amount of subsidies and counting wind as 75% efficient which is a joke. Talk to anybody who deals with Power Distribution and they will tell you Wind power in the U.S. at best is 15-20% efficient.
Actual wind power ( without subsidies and real efficiencies ) is reportedly around 8 times more expensive than coal.
Doug Badgero says:
October 20, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Jack 5:11pm:
“I work for American Electric Power (AEP) at their only nuclear site. For the record, I speak for myself NOT AEP.”
Too bad the world destroyed 75% of all the silver ever mined. Silver-zinc batteries would have been the way to go.
“ZPower is dedicated to innovating change in the field of battery technology. With its award-winning silver, zinc and water-based chemical makeup, ZPower offers a battery that delivers high performance while safely powering portable devices such as consumer electronics and hearing instruments. The battery’s aqueous technology also creates an earth-friendly, recyclable product that reduces environmental impact.
In the area of performance, ZPower batteries offer an extremely high ratio of energy to volume (Wh/l and Wh/kg). In fact, ZPower is the only rechargeable battery for consumer applications that beats lithium-ion in energy density – delivering 40% more energy. When compared to traditional nickel metal-hydride microbattries, ZPower has 2-3 times the energy density. And while lithium-ion and nickel metal-hydride are mature technologies that have reached an energy density plateau, ZPower batteries have plenty of runway to increase both energy density and cycle life. Over its cycle life, ZPower’s patented charge algorithm maintains a stable capacity unlike the steady capacity fade that occurs in traditional rechargeable batteries.
ZPower batteries use an environmentally friendly chemistry that allows battery cells to be recycled and 95% of the key elements reused. Unlike other traditional microbatteries, ZPower batteries are mercury-free and meet the upcoming U.S. ban on mercury in button cells in June 2011. Eliminating mercury from the battery simplifies the recycling process and avoids contaminating the environment. ”
http://www.zpowerbattery.com/
Can someone show, on a global basis, how many fossil fuel power plants have been shuttered as a result of bringing in wind or any other alternate energy sources?
Would it surprise anyone if the number is zero?
To simplify the problem let us presume you know a person who lives on a small Pacific island and whose main power is from a diesel generator which is powered by fuel gifted by some benevolent government, hence, free. Along comes another benevolent government who provides a new, powerful wind generator which you acquaintance embraces to great fanfare in the obliging press around the world. Your original benefactor, seeing the writing on the wall, cancels shipments of diesel fuel to your island oasis.
Using your powers of logic, what happens next on this little island? Might it include
* Dead birds
* Growing scavenger populations
* Fewer birds
* Power outages at the whim of nature
* High maintenance on the wind generator
* Purchasing diesel fuel to pay for wind free days
* High maintenance on the diesel generator because it sits unused
* Brownouts from light wind days
* Divorce because your wife thinks you are an idiot
* Your children think you are an idiot
* People quit stopping by your island because your beer is always warm and they think you are an idiot
* You begin to think you are an idiot and post your windmill on johnsonisland.craigslist.org and hope you get a bite
* You are abandoned on your island, and finally leave, yourself, because the birds are gone, the rats are starving, your wife and kids have moved to Morea, your wind generator has tossed a blade into the pea green sea, and your generator has rusted solid from lack of regular use
Suggest we use concise facts to convince Congress that renewables are not the way to go:
1. Renewables do not reduce oil imports as only 1.1% of electricity comes from oil (source- DOE for 2008 and it is even less now). I can’t believe the number of politicians who use foreign oil imports to justify renewables.
2. Unreliable renewables (without storage) cost from 3-10 times reliable natural gas generation. Add 25-100% for renewables storage (if it can be done) and 25% for storage losses.
3. Transmission costs for renewables are large in both terms of dollars and environmental impact. New England wind study proposes to add 4200 circuit miles of dual circuit 765Kv transmission. 23% renewables for New England would require a capital investment of $80B versus $20 for nuclear. Nuclear would also use existing sites and require very little transmission mostly on existing right of ways.
4. If your objective is reducing CO2, renewables are a very expensive way to do it. Renewables cost $333-666 per ton of CO2 removed versus $40-70 per ton for nuclear. On a national scale (7 B tons of CO2E emitted per year), it would cost $1-2T per year to remove all CO2 with renewables. It would be like having a subprime crisis every year.
5 Renewables are limited to reducing CO2 by less than 25% due to their low capacity factor. Renewables can’t meet 50% CO2 reduction goals by 2030 nor 80% by 2050. If you “can’t get there” , CO2 prices would spike just like California power prices and SO2 credits spiked (unless you can buy them from the Chinese). Why invest in a technology that prevents us from meeting CO2 reduction targets?
6 Renewables are caustic to reliable power system operations and are not “sustainable” – the more you add to the grid, the exponentially greater the negative impact on operations and cost.
7 Renewables are another ethanol. Once congress starts the economic dislocation, it will be difficult to stop.
8 There have been very little renewables actually added, hence little uproar. Some states are now reexamining their RPS requirements in view of the high costs and environmental impacts. While the states are pulling back, Congress is going in just the opposite direction. When the folly hits the fan, Congress can expect a suprime-like backlash.
Michael:
40% higher energy density than Li-ion would be a significant advancement for small scale apps we currently use batteries for but still doesn’t cut it at utility scale. What do they cost? How much silver do they use?
Hi Pastor,
Could you please share your wisdom with Rick Warren? He has done more damage with his green evangelism than anyone else in the Christian community. Please explain to him that windmills are medieval technology and the 21st Century energy is Helium-3 fusion, but until we get there, we have to rely on hydrocarbons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eem7hDeREsY
Mike, please don’t misinform people that Cap and Trade has anything to do with markets,
Cap & Trade Is Not A Market Solution (Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D. Economics)
Brian H>
Yes, that’s pretty much exactly what I said.
Doug Badgero>
“All this said, if you figure out a way to store electricity at Mw scales, let me know, we would both be fabulously wealthy. In addition, no one would need to build another power plant for decades. We would just operate the most economic ones we have at higher capacity factors.”
I’m not sure we’re that far off coming up with some very clever ways to do it – by which I mean they’re likely to be in practical use within the next ten to fifty years. I know I keep banging on about them, but truly large scale ground-source heat pumps can generate all the power we need in most areas, without any environmental cost once they’re installed. Incremental increases in the efficiency of the heat pumps will make a big difference.
Aside from the possibility of directly cutting out the electricity needed for heating and cooling buildings, people have been making slow progress on turning heat directly into electricity, at which point a) we just use ground-source power and b) we can run the systems in both directions, so they can equally be used for energy storage.
Power Engineer>
A minor quibble:
“1. Renewables do not reduce oil imports as only 1.1% of electricity comes from oil (source- DOE for 2008 and it is even less now). I can’t believe the number of politicians who use foreign oil imports to justify renewables.”
If you have electricity, it’s theoretically possible to replace oil powered vehicles with battery powered ones. Not practical, mind you, but it’s just another cost to add, not actually something they’re wrong on.
Doug Badgero says:
October 20, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Michael:
“40% higher energy density than Li-ion would be a significant advancement for small scale apps we currently use batteries for but still doesn’t cut it at utility scale. What do they cost? How much silver do they use?”
Doug,
The silver in those batteries are 100% recoverable.
The initial cost is a bit high due to the current $24/oz for silver, but you will never see people throwing them in the trash. That’s truly good for the environment. It’s a wonder why a denier like myself would endorse using them. It is beyond me why the environmentalists can’t see the value and speak of this type of battery. I think the Navy cornered the market in the technology for use in their torpedoes. What a waste.
What all you flat earthers and climate deniers do not realise is that the steel and concrete needed to produce wind farms is “good clean steel and concrete” and nothing like the “dirty, bad steel and concrete” needed to make coal fired power stations!
Having straightened out your twisted thinking, I’m feeling much better now.
/sarc off (in case you didn’t notice)
Did yo know that cap & tax AVOIDS taxing power plants in democratic congressional districts? It puts all the taxes on republican districts.
That is the first I have heard about this claim. Can you point to wording in the bill that would support such a your conclusion?