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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Baron Scarpia says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:17 am
“Way too much misinformation and exaggeration on this blog…”
And then he goes on to spread a generous portion of it in rebuttal I think. Is he from the wind industry public relations? Windmills are a perfect example of a subsidy black hole, the more there are the more they suck in ever greater quantities of subsidies which become an ever greater burden on those who actually have to foot the bill. Windfarms will never pay their way, are we to believe that somehow by magic each windmill will magically and drastically improve its efficiency from the fraction of capacity it now produces? Now Mr Scarpia is not keen on actually telling us any figures and it may be because they are so truly appalling.
Windmills DO NOT work, they are the most inefficient method of generating usable electricity on the planet and on a par with burning bundles of ten pound notes to keep warm. Windmills will never produce any net profit and only a tiny number of jobs, a fraction of those lost in the real economy that will surely be damaged by removal of affordable plentiful and reliable electricity. They are so unreliable that any electricity they do generate is useless for much of the time and the more windmills there are the greater the instability in the grid which will lead to fewer sites able to contribute anything. Landowners gain and those that feed off the subsidies gain and the public loses both in having to finance this ludicrous adventure and a collapse in economic activity due to unbearable electricity costs.
Smart grids? Their purpose is to ration energy and impose blackouts and a further reduction in economic activity. People without jobs cannot pay the inflated bills so the house of cards pyramid scheme collapses. This is what will happen, no ifs or buts. The undoubted representative from the wind industry PR HQ has no figures to offer us and there is a very good reason why he didnt include any, the figures are truly appallingly terrible.
The wind industry is not meant to stimulate industrial and economic expansion and its proven increase in individual wealth and wellbeing, it is meant to have the opposite effect. It is designed to inhibit and prevent economic growth by making electricity scare and rationed and expensive, it is in fact a tool of de-industrialisation and economic shrinkage, the people who support it most are the most determined to see us revert to some kind of post industrial pastoral existence.
Now Mr Scarpia wants us to believe that an expansion in the numbers of windmills will them more economic when in fact every addition to the numbers we are already cursed with will see more money lost and a vulnerable and ageing supply matrix become ever more prone to failure until the inevitable collapse occurs. The thing about subsidies is that someone always has to pay the price and its usually those who can least afford it, those at the bottom will be hit hardest of all, the elderly and the poor and those on low incomes. The wind industry is a pyramid scheme worthy of Bernie Madoff. If it were only money at stake it wouldnt be so bad but this is going to hurt a lot of people and a lot of ordinary people are going to suffer greatly for it.
The quote provided is neither quantified or accurate and is therefore meaningless. See
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=843 and
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=981 to get some quantification of eg energy extracted from wind, footprint, and birdkill. If the referenced material only contains hyperbole like the quote, it is just a crock of emotionally laden rubbish and not worth anyone’s time. All the good folks here who know that wind-power can’t be effective, but who also know that industrial free enterprise is always best should really talk to those free enterprise dummies at eg General Electric.
As an engineer, I am saddened by the total lack of intelligence regarding alternative energies. No one ever asks the most important question of all regarding any alternative energy. That question is: Will the alternative energy return more power than was needed to create it in the first place? If the Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) is less than unity, then the alternative energy is not sustainable and is a total waste of resources. This is true of solar pv, solar hot water, and wind.
I was so incensed about the nonsense of wind power, I wrote a book on it: Wind Power Fraud. In it I analyzed the only Embodied Energy (Emergy) analysis on the Internet I could find; Livermore Pass in CA. The EROEI was stated as 14.37. After correcting all the errors, it turns out the EROEI is really 0.29. The original Danish Wind Power web site had the audacious claim that wind power pays for itself in 3 months. (If that were true, then why does wind power have to be subsidized?) After analyzing a Danish example I showed the EROEI to be not 3 months, but 130 years!
Ask the most important question: Is the EROEI for a wind power project > 1? The answer IS ALWAYS NO! If they say it is yes, they are burying the substation, grid upgrade, VAR correction, and numerous other costs, which are ultimately passed onto the electric bill payer and taxpayer. In addition, they are most likely not paying for any of the electricity sucked off the grid to power the wind turbines auxiliaries, which are significant.
Open pit coal mining areas are reclaimed here in Montana: http://ecorestoration.montana.edu/mineland/histories/coal/eagle_rock/default.htm Plants that convert this coal to electricity are “scrubbed” to minimize pollution. If we go broke trying to use all the high cost methods the Sierra Club wants us to, concern about the environment will be one of the first casualties. The dirty little secret that lefties/greens don’t want out is that our air quality is much better than it was decades ago, thanks to technology: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/04/earth-day-2009-air-qualitys-better-than.html
P Walker says:
February 14, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Baron Scarpia , could you please list the government subsidies that the coal industry receives ?
____________________________________________________________
Electricity generation from coal receives a subsidy of about $0.40 per MWH. Wind, on the other hand, receives about $23.50 per MWH.
Dave Springer,
“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.”
You may be right, but that only speaks of the eternal stupidity of Governments.
Baron Scarpia, do you think windmills appear from thin air? In order to build a windmill you need to destroy large land areas in order to dig up rare earth and other metals that are needed. You need costly and environmentally unfriendly industrial processes in order to extract the metals from the ore you dig up. Energy consuming processes are needed in order to make magnets from the metals. The rotor blades are made of steel, made from iron dug up from the ground. The foundations are made of concrete, also dug up from the ground, and produced in an energy consuming process which also generates a lot of CO2. The machine parts are then transported, often by boats, run on fossil fuels, which spew out a lot of sulfur leading to acidification of land and water. After that, as others have mentioned above, the wind farms require a lot of land use, transportation networks, cause local destruction of nature, etc. I am quite sure that the economical, ecological and “energetical” costs of producing a wind mill will not be compensated for during its lifetime.
Dr. Dave ,
Thanks , but that wasn’t exactly what I was asking . Subsidies to power plants are not the same as a subsidy to the coal industry – AFAIK power companies don’t mine coal . In addition , not all coal goes to power production . I’ve read about alleged subsidies to the coal industry in environmental literature , but have yet to learn what these subsidies are – the closest I could find was a tax break on royalties paid on leases . This does not qualify as a subsidy , imho . I was hoping that B S could enlighten me .
Seems like almost everyone is dancing around what is needed to make windmills useful – buffering. As a matter of fact, buffering would bring new life to the tired, old power grid at a very reasonable cost. A fair amount (don’t have numbers, can anyone shed light?) of on – and off-peak power is dissapated due to over production. Adding buffering to each branch of the grid would store that power (maybe in batteries, water, compressed air, reversible chemical reactions, lifting giant weights, etc.) for use when needed.
At any rate, unreliable power can be made useable through buffering. This will become obvious as more residential wind and solar systems come on line. These systems will be adding power back into the grid in a completely uncontrolled fashion, increasing the amount of wasted power on the grid and costing each non power system owner more per KWH to make up for those who are no longer paying and who may be getting a check from the utility company.
Articles sent…
http://windconcernsontario.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/watts-up-with-the-wind-in-ontario-2010/
http://ontariowindperformance.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/chapter-3-1-powering-ontario/
Wind is not a great performer and it is correlated over wide areas — they are now aware of this in Texas as much as in Ontario Canada.
>>Baron
>>Thus, the wind is predictable, and the task for utilities is to match
>>demand with the multiple resources at hand.
Ha, ha, ha. What planet are you on? Predictable windpower is an oxymoron.
Read that Danish wind report I posted, at the top of this thread. The wind power in Denmark is so unpredictable and so unreliable, that the Danish have never used any of it. The sell it to Scandinavia instead, who can integrate it with hydro electricity.
But there is not enough hydro capability in the UK to do this. Not enough hills, and too many people.
.
I notice some glib discussion about backup power to wind turbines. Do you have any idea how a serious turbine in a generating station is started up from standstill and run down again? No? Look into it. You will laugh yourself sily when somebody says “just have some back up power”.
Baron Scarpia, beware of Cassandra King above. I suspect that she is really Floria Tosca in disguise. I can’t wait to hear her singing Vissi d’arte as she rebuts your arguments. Of course, you have to sing Già, mi dicon venal before she enters. That aria seems appropriate given that sufficient data has been accumulated for the economics community to render moot the various claims about the economic benefits of wind farms. Several are linked above and others are easily found by using your favorite search engine.
In fairness to renewables (and unfortunately they are politically used as ‘reshiftables’ by our rent-seeking graduazzi class) they are best used for desalination, where the desal water is added to existing supply (ie it does not have to be 100% desal) and variability of supply with automated plants is not an issue.
In Australia various States have rushed out costly desal plants in response to the long General Drought and just as they’re about to come online, naturally we’re up to our mantel-pieces in water. Murphys Law! Presumably with all that snow on the ground in the Northern Hemisphere, you’re not about to build desal plants?
With respect to fossil fuel subsidies like coal quite the reverse is happening in Australia with the Federal Govt proposing a hefty Minerals Resource Rent Tax soon due to the rising price of commodities. This will impact heavily on coal as Australia is a major world supplier.
Here are some more wind turbine failures. They look pretty dangerous devices, to me.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_blnN-QHR9C4/TJw65jcXDvI/AAAAAAAAApE/MSNEU4-OPM0/s1600/434004b66ee8ae81a169af47f6d24dc9-jpg400x400.jpg
http://www.abd.org.uk/images/photos/fallen_wind_turbine.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/u14tBwO5QVQ/0.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/12/02/article-1232540-076E050E000005DC-775_634x427.jpg
http://www.noturbinesin.saddleworth.net/Pictures/FallenTurbine1.jpg
http://ruralgrubby.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/windmill-collapse.jpg
http://www.windbyte.co.uk/ims/safety/noble_turbine.jpg
http://windconcernsontario.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/searsburg-vt-sept-2008-collapse.jpg
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/167877_10150383324780214_518940213_17120736_1293224_n1.jpg?w=640&h=480
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/nejournal/jan2008/7/2/6D6EE720-EAC5-DA69-46CDFD94DC123460.jpg
http://www.windcows.com/files/100_0355_op_399x600.jpg
And here are a few that have burst into flames.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4ify7vDXrDs/THE6GVeA81I/AAAAAAAAGcU/XxZ1qgqQVxE/s1600/wind-shock-2.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_r78OS9t_bOY/SdPw4HJfGYI/AAAAAAAAALY/a-S4TBN5d6s/s400/5d81cf0b86232ee22722444f0d7d12c9-jpg400x400++wind+fire.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/u14tBwO5QVQ/0.jpg
http://www.theresilientearth.com/files/images/german_turbine_fire-der_spiegel.jpg
http://www.changecollege.org.uk/img/Cape_Wind_Turbine_Burning.jpg
http://www.backcountryagainstdumps.org/images/007.png
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3D5RYqYRgLY/TF29LZLGo3I/AAAAAAAAAFQ/80ryKqbuMcM/s400/windmill-failure-02-400.jpg
.
Wind turbines have a built in self destruct vibration; that has cost implications. The cause is wind shear. As every sailor knows, the wind at the mast head is quite a bit stronger than at deck level. In case you haven’t noticed; the recent evolution of America’s Cup class main sails, have slowly morphed into the same design as Chinese Junks have had for centuries. They have gone from triangular to square topped; in an effort to put more sail area aloft where the stronger winds are.
So a wind tubine blade encounters much higher wind speeds when the blade tip is going over the top of the tower, compared to when it is closest to the ground. The collected power goes up with the cube of that wind speed, and the thrust against the axle and tower goes as the square of the wind speed, so as the blade rotates, it sees a synchronous axial thrust cycle, that causes the blade tip to oscillate in the axial direction at the rotation speed. For the same reason, the circumferential thrust (the wing lift) also undergoes a torsional cycli variation also synchronous with the roation speed.
So the blade is warped in two directions simultaneously; which is why they shake like the dickens, and kick up a row that annoys the neighbors. Eventaully it leads to fatigue failure of the composite blades.
How about this theory: Windmills are causing “apparent global warming”.
Windmills are interfering with normal wind patterns, pushing warm air into the Arctic and redirecting the normal Arctic flow to NA, Europe, and Asia. Arctic ice is melting and Northern Hemisphere is freezing.
If we don’t reduce our “wind footprint” immediately, the Polar Bear will die of heatstroke and humans will starve and freeze to death due to “permanent winter”.
“”””” George Steiner says:
February 14, 2011 at 3:31 pm
I notice some glib discussion about backup power to wind turbines. Do you have any idea how a serious turbine in a generating station is started up from standstill and run down again? No? Look into it. You will laugh yourself sily when somebody says “just have some back up power”. “””””
I’m sure that is quite true, a cold start-up of a giant water turbine is not a trivial exercise; so why would you want to cold start one; or shut it down; except for mainteance requiring access to the rotor.
But alternators obey Lenz’s law, so if you want to draw more power from one; remebering that it is phase locked to the grid; you don’t start up a stationary one, you increase the water flow drive to the turbine, in step with the load pick-up, and when you want to shed some load, then you cut back on the water drive.
The big weakness of wind turbines, is that the operator has no control over the input energy source; the wind, so he cannot adjust the wind to meet increased grid loading demand.
All successful practical power (electric) power generating systems; have fully throttleable primary energy input sources.
Wind turbines do not; nor do solar cells; but they are a little easier on connecting to the grid, since they are electronically synchronised to the grid cycle; and behave somewhat like current sources, operating at a fixed Voltage.
Renewable energy (solar) works best when it can be used as it comes straight from the sun; to either put rain into a watershed hydro dam, or perhaps to pump water in a pumped storage system. It could also be used thermally to pump; via heat pipes, a discontinuous source of solar heat into a deep oil shale deposit to melt the oil out for recovery; so oyu don’t have to set fire to the oil shale, and waste some of it melting the rest. It’s a perfect situation for just continuous input of solar thermal energy, anytime it is available from the sun. Sooner or later, it will get hot enough down there for the shale oil to flow for recovery, so oyu don’t have to dig all the shale out of the ground first. So what if it takes two years to get up to the needed Temperature !
All the facts about wind turbines can be had from the companies sporting the damnations in the first place.
However if you’re interested in the birds and bats getting slaughtered it seems one has to turn to proper ornithologists NOT connected to hippie organizations such as Greenpeace or WWF or their respective wannabe organizations, nor appropriate local or federal government entities if them are running the common scheme to get subsides, or otherwise getting extra tax funds for “saving the planet from CAGW” which, apparently, ironically, tend to be the local and federal entities getting subsidized for letting whom ever setting up hundreds and thousands of windmills in their geographic areas. Of course if you can find the ones going against the same flow that pays their salary . . .
Hoser says *8:48am);
“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.”
Hoser,
The smart meter will also enable dynamic pricing (time of use pricing). Rather then having the electrical supplier turn off your devices you can make a decision to leave them on if you are willing to pay more for the electricity at high demand times. I expect dynamic pricing to become the standard somewhere around 2015 or so (as we will have more renewable energy in the state -CA- as a percentage of the overall supply of electrical power as required by the RES targets) for the residential market.
A report from the CEC (500-2010-014) entitled “Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Implementation: Testing Implementation of a Demand Response Program Within a Small Business Population” indicates that some folks would modify their demand at peak times (for a price/benefit). http://www.energy.ca.gov/2010publications/CEC-500-2010-014/CEC-500-2010-014.PDF
I thought that the reference to car dealer who responded to a call to reduce demand by going off grid was rather interesting- and likely a very cost effective activity for the dealer.
George Steiner says:
February 14, 2011 at 3:31 pm
“I notice some glib discussion about backup power to wind turbines. Do you have any idea how a serious turbine in a generating station is started up from standstill and run down again? No? Look into it. You will laugh yourself sily when somebody says “just have some back up power”.”
It’s called spinning reserve. You keep the boiler at operating temperature but only draw off enough steam to keep the turbine spinning under no load. Very little fuel or wear and tear happens under no load conditions. You’re still paying for the cost of capital (which isn’t much for coal/NG but is for nuclear) and have to pay the same number of employees of course but spinning reserve can be brought online and taken offline quickly. Winds are as fickle and to a lesser degree so are temperatures but both are fairly predictable a day in advance and one day ahead is all the grid managers need to shuffle their sources around. Power demand follows temperature along with time of day and day of week so under most circumstances they can plan ahead pretty well even with wind power added to the equation and they’re improving as they go along. The main reason not much potential wind power makes it onto the grid is that it’s still pretty expensive compared to coal and NG so it’s only purchased during periods of peak demand. As more wind farms in different locations are added to the grid the available power at any one time will increase with less variability because the winds don’t just stop blowing everywhere across a state as large as Texas. Economy of scale in manufacturing will keep driving prices down and lessons learned the hard way from failures will feed back into the design cycle and make the turbines and blades more robust.
Perhaps I’ve been a bit hasty and the battery fed chooks of the Fourth Estate are beginning to get it (sort of)-
”We’ve drawn down on our political capital with little to show for it and it’s going to make sensible action harder.”
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/billions-blown-on-carbon-schemes-20110214-1atqj.html
P Walker says:
February 14, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Baron Scarpia , could you please list the government subsidies that the coal industry receives ?
————————————————————————————-
And while he is about that, I would be really interested in where all of these “government” built (and financed?) railroads and pipelines are located.
I’m pretty sure that what the watermelons call “subsidies” , the rest of the world would refer to as “tax deductable expenses”. You know, like depreciation, leases, costs to reclaim mining areas, etc.
There’s another key item that nearly everyone in the discussion about wind over the years has missed. Most of the wind power purchase contracts make no provision for decommissioning. Most of the wind installations are private companies that sell power at a fixed rate. That fixed rate usually enables them to recover their capital costs rapidly, very much so in the case of the early German contracts.
So what happens when the subsidy spigot from the government dries up? The company pockets its profits and walks away. The taxpayer in many cases will be left with the decommissioning costs for these things, just as it was left with the decommissioning costs of many other things like old mine sites.
We’ve already seen this situation in the US. There are a number of wind farms that have simply been abandoned, notably one in Hawaii. On shore is one thing; imagine what the decommissioning costs of these monstrosities will be for offshore installations like Horn’s Reef. With conventional large generation like nuclear, it’s not a problem. Regulated utilities collect decommissioning funds as the facility operates, but the wind farms don’t.
As for Baron Scarpia: “Thus, the wind is predictable…” You’ve just shown that you know nothing about ambient wind conditions which can and do usually change minute by minute. And since energy varies with the cube of the speed, the changes in energy output are disproportionate.
“In America, studies have shown that wind diversifies energy sources, so that as a replacement for gas, it actually reduces the cost of natural gas.”
Drivel. The demand for gas is enormous compared to the output of US wind generation. The effect of wind on gas prices is therefore utterly negligible in theory, let alone the fact that gas is driven also by constraints on distribution systems over which wind supply can have no effect.
“Water guzzled from conventional power plants reduces what can be used to produce food.”
More grotesque distortions. Water taken in by thermal plants for turbine steam condensation is returned to the river or lake and is still available for any use. With closed circuit cooling, there is no intake at all except for evaporation losses. It is not used up. Evaporation losses are not the entire intake, only a very small fraction.
“the “land footprint” for wind turbines…”
Yes, let’s talk about that foot print for just a moment. Perhaps you can explain why on a per unit of generating capacity (leaving capacity factor entirely out of it for the moment) wind requires three times as much concrete and nearly seven times as much steel per MW capacity as does nuclear. Take the power factor into account and it becomes about 12 times and 28 times the resource demand as nuclear.
Oh yes, and because of the variable and very large number of sources, the transmission requirement is at least double that of any large thermal power station. Left that little “footprint” out too, didn’t you? Fact is, wind has the largest footprint in land use of any form of generation excepting only solar power for obvious reasons. All of the land use implications were all thoroughly analyzed years ago by the very good study “Energy for 300 Years” by Nathwani, Siddall and Lind.
@george Smith
“Wind turbines do not; nor do solar cells; but they are a little easier on connecting to the grid, since they are electronically synchronised to the grid cycle; and behave somewhat like current sources, operating at a fixed Voltage.”
I was a bit taken aback by the price of residential grid interconnect hardware for net metering of solar photovoltaics. The DC->AC convertor, phase synchronization, and net meter cost about as much per watt as the solar panels themselves. If the those pieces were standardized and mass produced hopefully the price would come way down along with PV cells and panels. I couldn’t find anything reasonable for storing a few days worth of solar electricity – a bank of lead-acid batteries is the cheapest way but my experience with lead-acid batteries makes me definitely not want to own, store, and maintain a bank of 30 of them in order to get off the grid altogether! So a grid interconnect seems the only way to go for people who have a grid connection in the first place.
That said it does appear feasible on first blush to store a few days worth of heat in a well insulated hot water tank and a few days worth of cooling in a small ice house. You can make ice during the day with solar electric to drive the compressor and use a DC motor so you don’t have the expense or losses associated with a DC->AC convertor. Hot water can be produced directly from solar collectors with maybe a few fresnel lenses in a final stage to bring the water up to boiling where it can store a lot of latent heat.
After you have an ice house then you can just circulate air through it with a low power DC fan to get cooled air into the house and do the same to circulate hot water for heating. After those two high power needs are taken care of you can use 12vdc for lighting straight from a lead-acid battery and for those leftover appliances that just don’t come easily or cheaply in DC versions a much smaller battery bank and AC convertor can power those.
That’s a lot of crap to cobble up just to get off the grid altogether with no major sacrifice in convenience – more than I want to do but I think it can be done and in the long run may be less costly than grid power.
I also looked into syngas (maker’s gas) which might be familiar to UK citizens old enough during WWII to remember them powering civilian gasoline engines to conserve gasoline for the war effort. A decent size one of those powered by homegrown biomass is feasible. You’d then have a renewable source of fuel for a generator and could use the gas directly for heating and cooling. I read about some people out in the boonies with a homemade syngas rig doing all that but it required fairly uniformly cut wood chips instead of any old kind of combustable biomass so they had to spend a couple of hours a day cutting and chipping wood, fueling it up for the day and removing the ashes. But they were powering a good size machine shop with a few employees so had much larger power needs than a small residence. Syngas generation is still a bit pricey for the hardware and especially so if you’re producing gas clean enough so it doesn’t compromise the service life of a standard gasoline engine but it’s really interesting and there’s plenty of room from improvement especially in being able to use non-uniform sources of combustable biomass so you don’t have to produce your own uniformly sized wood chips. Mass production of syngas generators could bring the price down to something very reasonable. Not for everyone but I know quite a few people up north who still heat their homes in the winter with wood they harvest themselves – some even have new-fangled furnaces that can take just about anything that burns instead of cut & split logs.