From Viv Forbes of Australia’s Carbon Sense Coalition comes this new document intended as “a submission to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms” on the extraordinary costs of wind power generation both economically and environmentally:
Wind power is so dilute that to collect a significant quantity of wind energy will always require thousands of gigantic towers each with a massive concrete base and a network of interconnecting heavy duty roads and transmission lines. It has a huge land footprint.
Then the operating characteristics of turbine and generator mean that only a small part of the wind’s energy can be captured.
Finally, when they go into production, wind turbines slice up bats and eagles, disturb neighbours, reduce property values and start bushfires.
Wind power is intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict. To cover the total loss of power when the wind drops or blows too hard, every wind farm needs a conventional back-up power station (commonly gas-fired) with capacity of twice the design capacity of the wind farm to even out the sudden fluctuations in the electricity grid. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.
The entire document is 30 pages long.
Can I suggest that rather than just read and comment on the document, perhaps some talented WUWT readers could help Viv by doing some fact-checking or provide some further concrete examples of how wind power will cost the Earth.
Viv’s email address is in the doco (as they say in those parts)
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What’s futile is thinking that these rather large fans will cool us all down. I walked past two today and they had no effect whatsoever. Looks like a waste of electricity to me!
M Simon says:
February 14, 2011 at 7:15 am
Rocky Road,
> Five years from now–anybody care to refute this prediction?
> http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=2829
See RockyRoad’s comments at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/22/cold-fusion-going-commercial/
Baron Scarpia says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:17 am
Way too much misinformation and exaggeration on this blog…
Yes, wind power is intermittent, but wind parks are developed where the wind profile has been studied and measured.
__________________________________
In CA the Energy Commission has released 100m wind maps. We’ll get to that below. Each wind turbine uses 80 acres. That provides a 1/3 to 1/2 mile separation between turbines that occassionally disintegrate. The separation is needed to protect the neighboring turbines. I’ve posted this before, but here goes again:
To provide 10% of power needs in CA would require 10,000 1.5 MW wind turbines. On 80 acres each, you need 1250 square miles of land. Except there isn’t enough land area with the required wind speeds (the CEC wind speed maps at 100m AGL). That means the turbines need to be built off shore. 1250 sq miles translates to 500 miles of coastline with 7 or so rows of tubrines from the shore out to sea covering a band 2.5 miles wide.
Who would support such a ridiculous scheme? Nobody without a financial or political interest. There is a dirty little secret. These unreliable green power sources require autoresponse through smart grid to monitor and turn off devices in your home. But smart grid is much more than that. It is much more dangerous than that. The government plan is to create smart grid first, before the wind power is installed.
The excuse for the total assault on freedom and privacy is the supposed need for green energy (green is the new red, by the way – very chic with a hammer and sickle). When it becomes clear the scheme doesn’t work, they will still have smart grid. They know the green power plan is unworkable now. That tells me the only part they care about is smart grid.
Smart grid will let government monitor what you do in your home (data mining provision in Title XIII, EISA 2007). Government and hackers will be able to get to your personal information through the wires in your home (Home Plug, Intellon) when computers have the new power supplies with the Intellon chip built in. With these power supplies you are networked whenever your computer is plugged into the wall. They are being sold in Europe now.
Big corporations are backing this travesty (GE, CISCO, Intel, IBM to name a few), believing they will reap huge profits in new regulation-based markets. This is a horrible cabal of government and industry planning to force you to spend your money and simultaneously take your freedom away.
Europeans gave their freedom away a long time ago, if they ever had it, so they don’t seem to notice much of a difference with and without smart grid. Amercians are still the last best hope to fight back. Aussies, strap on a pair and lets do this together.
As regards what Ryan says: February 14, 2011 at 8:25 am, this is not the experience of the Danes. Maintenance costs are very high and their turbines are coming to the end of their useful working life before they have repaid the capital costs.
Further, it does not automatically follow that alternative energy proces will rocket in price. First there is shale gas which could provide plentiful and cheap energy. Second, there is no reason why nuclear should dramatically increase in costs and if Thorium reactors can come on stream, real costs may actually reduce. Third whilst coal mining may become slightly more expensive, there is no reason from a supply point for it to rocket in cost. This just leaves oil which in any event is not used in significant quantities for wholesale energy production. The price of oil is largely speculatively driven. Presently, its value has not reflected either physical supply (note OPEC control release quantaties to influence the market price) nor cost of extraction. If we set up coal to liquid plants, then this will help stabilize the cost of oil since these plants breakeven at about $60 per barrel. If we were to set up such plants then oil would have to compete and (subject to inflation) this may cap oil prices at below 470 per barrel.
Wind does not make economic sense since you always need back up. This will apply in the future such that 10 or 20 years down the line you will still need 100% backup with conventional stations on line. The cost of wind therefore must additionally include the costs of building, maintaining and running the backup conventional generation stations.
The final sentence of my second paragraph should read:
“If we were to set up such plants then oil would have to compete and (subject to inflation) this may cap oil prices at below $70 per barrel.”
Regarding Europeans, I was ranting about Western Europe. Eastern Europeans know better than all of us how bad government oppression can be. They can teach us a lot, and we need to listen. Vaclav Klaus is a particularly important voice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/may/01/vacla-klaus-emissions-economy
“Hydro may be best for short spikes”
Here in the Pacific Northwest we have 18 GW of peak hydro and 3.5 GW of wind.
We don’t really have a problem backing up wind for short spikes.
The problem goes in the other direction. If all the windmills are blowing we can’t completely turn off the hydro otherwise we would dry up our rivers and kill all the fish.
It’s just a part of natures patterns that good wind tends to follow good rains.
It’s also part of natures pattern that August tends to have little wind and no rain.
In August the hydro dams are running on minimum to conserve water and the windmills are doing nothing.
So our grand plan to close our coal fired plants as we had all this ‘clean energy’ failed. The poor eco-friendly governors of Washington and Oregon had no choice but to extend the licenses on our coal fired plants.
Baron Scarpia: The reality is that often wind turbines will be taken off line when too much power is being generated for demand load.
I have trouble following you here. The goal of wind generation is to displace power from conventional sources. Only when wind has displaced 100 percent of conventional power can it be said to generate too much power. Has that ever happened?
observa says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:07 am
So, investors in wind farms and such are in a dilemma? As investors, they cannot reveal the truth about what they invested in, that it has no future, and cannot criticize the people who ripped them off because they are hoping that some more governments follow Britain and make the same stupid investments. I was wondering why investors in this wind farm idiocy, and many others, were not suing investment houses left and right.
Baron Scarpia says:
“Fourth, the subsidies for coal, oil, nuclear, and natural gas far outstrip subsidies for wind. The need for government built railroads and pipelines are eliminated with wind, as well as diesel fuel to transport coal from mines to power plants.
“Fifth, it is true that bats continue to be a problem with turbines, and the industry is working on that issue. The situation with birds, however, can be addressed with proper siting, and many bird advocacy groups actually support wind. Additionally, other things, such as cats, cars, and buildings have significantly higher bird kill rates compared to wind power plants, and these things are rarely criticized for their impact on birds.”
All your points are debatable, but regarding these last two: if all subsidies were eliminated [which I would support], we would still have fossil fuels and nuclear. But wind power, being a ridiculous, inefficient waste of resources, would go the way of the buggy whip.
Without the huge taxpayer subsidies being shoveled out, wind power would be almost non-existent. There is no economic justification for this foolish travesty. It is based on the falsehood that CO2 is harmful.
Wind power is inefficient and a blight on the landscape. So-called environmentalists have been bought off, and now support this environmentally damaging hoax.
Re: your point #5, how is ‘industry working on that issue’ coming along? And how will birds be informed that a windmill has been properly sited? Those claims sound like pablum for the masses. And sparrows being caught by cats or flying into windows doesn’t compare with apex predators like eagles and large scavengers like condors being sliced and diced.
Wind power is a total misallocation of resources that puts many thousands of people out of work. See Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy. The sooner that wind power subsidies are eliminated, the sooner these ugly monstrosities will disappear.
Bqron Scarpia,
You simply fib, not to put too fine a point on it.
Wind power is in its nature tied to wind. Wind is in fact intermittent.
Wind depends on direct operating support in the form of price guarantees paid for by tax payers and favorable depreciation and tax credits.
Fossil fuels do not.
The obfuscation that windmill supporters use to pretend that the tax treatment of oil and gas is the equivalent of an operating subsidy and price guarantee at tax payer expense is annoying and make me think cynical on the part of your side, since it so untrue.
Baron Scarpia says:
Wind power produces no stench, pollution, toxic chemicals
Oh yes it does!!! I guess you didn’t see the item about the five-mile-wide lake of toxic sludge in China caused by maufacturing these things. Or perhaps you don’t care because it’s only Chinese children who are having ther life expectancy slashed bit by bit every time one of these subsidised monstrosities goes up in the West!
Smokey,
“See Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy.”
I am a great fan of the broken window fallacy. It sounds so obvious, but the fallacy arises on numerous occasions and in numerous forms. One of the best and most humorous descriptions is from Henry Hazlit.
http://wichitaliberty.org/economics/henry-hazlitt-explains-frederic-bastiat-or-a-broken-window-really-hurts-no-matter-what-the-new-york-times-says/
When it comes to wind and solar installations, I think we have the whole thing backwards. Rather than spending millions (billions?) on boondoggle projects that only make the multinationals (like GE) richer, why not spend the money in the form of REAL tax breaks for local installations on privately owned homes, commercial real estate centers, apartment buildings and so on? It doesn’t happen because the government only wants to reward the big corporations and investment bankers who reap the profits from construction of these useless “farms” and then return the favor in campaign contributions. This is crony capitalism at work.
In small, localized, private installations the energy is used when it is available, thereby reducing our “carbon footprint” during those favorable times. The energy is used more efficiently at the source, so that if you have a solar installation on your apartment building in Denver, and it is generating power while the sun is shining, you don’t have to worry about the fact that the sun isn’t shining or the wind not blowing in central Kansas where there are huge farms that have to send the electricity hundreds of miles to you. When the sun isn’t shining in Denver, you use the grid’s conventional power sources.
It has been shown that, in small, private installations, people can recoup the cost of the equipment and installation for wind and solar within about 5 years. The life expectancy of the equipment runs about 20. The government could make it even more attractive by offering MEANINGFUL tax credits – not the token one’s we see.
Of course, the utilities hate the idea of the government subsidizing private individuals, viewing this as a missed opportunity for profits, but they are still going to be needed for conventional “grid power” and the demands for that will still grow.
When you have many private individuals buying wind and solar installations you create more opportunities for private enterprise AND you create competition. Nobody will buy windmills that freeze up in cold weather or solar panels that have half the life expectancy of the average. You get better, more efficient stuff through competition.
Global warming or not, the idea of alternative energy is still a good idea for many, many reasons, most of them political.
People might think that the idea of windmills and solar panels sprouting up all over large urban centers is distasteful, but why would we want this stuff all over our beautiful countryside? Isn’t that more distasteful? Private power generation puts more control in the hands of the people and less in the hands of big government entities. Isn’t that what most of us ultimately want?
Unfortunately, we have the best government money can buy. It will continue that way until the people demand something different.
To the several commenters who are still enthusiastic for pumped storage I would recommend reviewing this table
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html
It is fairly densely packed with information, but it is still quite easy to locate the data for pumped storage. Just let you eye scan down the page until you come to the row which has a minus sign in front of every annual value, that’s the pumped storage line. It supplies a negative contribution that runs a order of magnitude or two bigger than the entire solar sector and until 2002 eclipsed the combined output of wind and solar together. The table does show the rather impressive growth in wind’s contribution. Impressive unless you look at it terms of total overall demand and consider that it’s percent contribution has been boosted greatly by the serious downturn in demand as a result of the declining economy. If the economy has really turned, wind’s growing trend is likely to be reversed as demand return’s to pre-recession levels, even if the dramatic proliferation of wind turbines is continued, which seems more and more unlikely.
Some sad stats about wind farms…
Oil kills 2.5 birds per peta-joule of energy produced, wind kills 1,114 per peta-joule.
Considering that the oil industry is taking precautions to avoid killing birds, the wind farms can’t do anything about it since they can’t change their design.
http://dailybayonet.com/?p=7899
TFNJ says:
February 14, 2011 at 2:07 am
Yes, wind power needs backup.
You stated the problem exactly. You pay twice for electricity. So wind power by your own admission is expensive and not reliable.
Good job.
Just found the link to that China sludge lake
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html#ixzz1CYU3lfS8
It’s actually in that ‘Common Sense’ pdf! (Serves me right for not reading it first!)
RockyRoad says:
February 14, 2011 at 5:49 am
“I’m offering a friendly wager that 5 years from now, all wind turbine farms world-wide will be eliminated…”
Yeah, interesting point. If all these wind installations really, really are a bad idea with the only thing keeping them going being government subsidies and fad thinking; then at some time there will be a tulip-bulb-madness-of-crowds moment. I have casually mention 10-20 years from now but I like your number better.
And I wonder why the save the earth crowd continues to ignore the cost on wildlife destruction?
http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/110202.html
wayne Job says:
February 14, 2011 at 1:05 am
“These are state of the art wind turbines, totally useless as generating equipment.
However they make excellent water pumps. Any forward thinker with money should obtain the many dead ones and set up a pumped storage capacity for hydro electric peak feed in and make money for jam. California has hundreds of dead ones and lots of high country. Thousands of miles of coast line around the world have high elevations close to the coast, pump the sea water uphill and use the power as you need it. Do not these fools in their folly see the idiocy of electricity from the fickle winds. However they are excellent water pumps.”
Interesting idea. The pumps would need to supply enough head to make the climb and overcome pipe friction on the way up and you’d lose energy to pipe friction on the way back down too. A improvement would to feed the water turbine directly from the wind turbine when there was a market for the electicity and when the market was less than current production capacity pipe the excess uphill. When the wind isn’t blowing but there’s a market for the electricity then drain the reservoir to produce it. That way you avoid the two-way cost of pipe friction losses a significant portion of the time and won’t add very much at all to system cost or complexity.
Possibly a great idea the devil is probably in the details of finding a suitable location 500 feet above sea level where the ecoloons won’t freak out when you make an artificial salt-water lake in the fresh-water environment. There probably isn’t any location where you could do that economically. They’d definitely want, and would be justified in demanding, an impermeable basin so you don’t salinate the ground water in the area.
An workable alternative might be to use a fresh water reservior and a jet-pump system where you have two pipes – going the the reservoir and a closed system where the water coming downhill to power the hydro-electric pump is pumped back uphill the the reservoir by the wind mills. That would double the length of pipe going the windmills and all that doubling of pipe lengths which would of course double the friction losses in the pipe making the whole shooting match substantially less efficient.
hunter says:
February 14, 2011 at 5:16 am
I thought it a great picture too. It really encapsulates the term ‘wind power’ – power of the wind…
Baron Scarpia , could you please list the government subsidies that the coal industry receives ?
11:40 am
RockyRoad says:
February 14, 2011 at 5:49 am
“I’m offering a friendly wager that 5 years from now, all wind turbine farms world-wide will be eliminated…”
I’ll make a friendly wager that 5 years from now the current installed base of wind turbines is not only still spinning but also that will be larger number of them in operation. Furthermore I predict there will be an improvement in the ratio between faceplate capacity and the amount of electricity the windfarms actually sell. Currently faceplate capacity (optimal winds blowing constantly across every turbine in the state) is 1 gigawatt, average saleable electricity is 300 megawatts, and the amount of saleable electricity that is actually purchased is about 100 megawatts.
Unless the price of coal and gas goes down instead of up over the next 5 years that will mean more saleable wind-power actually gets sold because the spot market price for electricity will have a starting price during periods of low demand and less price increase needed during high demand for wind-energy price to become attractive. I understand during the rolling blackhout in Texas last week spot price was bid upwards to over $2000/mwh hour from a normal price of $100/mwh.
Umm… I meant that friendly wager above to apply only to windpower in Texas. I believe conditions in Texas are optimal for wind farms in all kinds of climate conditions – political climate, ecoloon climate, economic climate, and weather climate.
Adverse climates elsewhere may very well make wind power generation decline on a global basis so I won’t bet against that.
The turbine “flicker” associated with these things is proven to be a trigger for epileptic seizures.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18397297
As a skeptic with photosensitive epilepsy, I’m not terribly impressed by wind power.