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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Colin says:
February 14, 2011 at 8:00 pm
“wind requires three times as much concrete and nearly seven times as much steel
per MW capacity as does nuclear”
Yeah, and if enriched uranium fuel was laying around on the ground instead of requiring huge complicated centrifuge farms to produce it (you might ask yourself why a rich nation like Iran is having such great difficulty producing their own nuclear fuel) you might have a point. But it isn’t just laying around and does take an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce it. Then you have the depleted fuel disposal problem to deal with and proliferation concerns. I suppose you’ll start blowing the liquid flourine thorium reactor horn now that I’ve pointed out the great expense of producing enriched uranium fuel. I’ll believe in efficacy of the LFTR reactors when I see a commercial unit up and running. Until then LFTR is just pie in the sky.
Vince Causey says:
February 14, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Looks like I’m getting a few takers at the betting table, so let me throw out some tantalizing chips:
The 1 MW plant Defkalion is currently building in Miami, FL, requires 125 E-Cat units (with dimensions of 1m x 0.5m x 0.5 m each); assuming a 33% conversion rate (to make the math easy) to electricity using the Carnot cycle would require just 375 E-Cats for 1 MW of electricity. Multiply that by 1,000 to get 1 GW of power requires 375,000 E-Cats. Each is loaded with just 1 gram of nickel and a smaller amount of hydrogen and run for half a year, are serviced twice a year, so the total amount of nickel used to generate 1 GW is just 375,000 grams * 2 / 1E6 = 0.75 tonnes per year.
The most recent electricity consumption figure I could find for Texas is 316 GW, (http://www.statemaster.com/state/TX-texas/ene-energy) which would require a grand total of 237 tonnes of nickel each year. Compare that to the 97,000,000 tons of coal Texas burns to generate just part of the electricity it consumes and nickel wins hands down (nickel currently sells for $12 a lb, or about $26,500 per tonne and world-wide production is about 1.2 million tonnes of nickel produced annually; Texas’ total consumption of nickel in E-Cats would run around $9.9 million/yr). But what about actual cost of the electricity from an E-Cat power plant?
Cost: Andrea Rossi, one of the inventors of the E-Cat, stated “I estimate that the cost of energy made with this system will be below 1 cent/kWh, in case of electric power made by means of a Carnot cycle…”
Reliability: E-Cats run continuously for 6 months between maintenance exchanges. They are scalable in series or parallel to meet any power demand, meaning they can be sited practically anywhere. They are considered reliable baseload without any of the vagaries that plague wind power. And they don’t have any smokestacks and effluent like coal-fired plants, don’t require the sun like solar panels, nor a huge volume of water at head like hydro plants. And unlike nuclear power plants, the “waste” of an E-Cat is simply copper and that just happens to be completely non-radioactive. Sweet!
You’re telling me that windmills will be able to compete with such a unit?
But perhaps the best thing about E-Cats is that they’re driving the theoretical physicists with their hearts set on hot fusion as the future energy source completely nuts!
Does anybody want to reconsider their bets?
Mark Miller says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Yes, it is also refered to as time-of-use (TOU) metering. We’ll all have to do our laundry and cooking at 2 am.
TOU metering of water is going to be interesting. With sufficient time resolution, you can tell how many times someone flushes the toilet and whether they wash their hands. You can tell how long they shower and whether they have installed the appropriate shower flow restrictor or taken it out. And then of course, you can fine them for failing to comply with regulations.
David says: “…A new offshore farm has just been approved off the mouth of the Humber – and the press release stated that this would power (note the phrase) ‘UP TO 150000 homes…’ At the time I wrote to them, I suggested they took a look at the NETA tables for electricity production (updated every ten minutes). It was a typical February day – and wind was providing 6% of installed capacity (0.3% of total demand). On that basis, this money pit in the North Sea (our money, of course) would have powered 9350 homes.”
Well, of course, that’s in the UK, where the authorities talk only “Wrecker-Speak.” What they mean is that the North Sea installation will power 9,350 homes, plus
140,650 dark ones.
Ive had this paper saved for a few years .. it has a lot of the same topics as the one you want us to read. http://www.aweo.org/problemwithwind.html
I find this debate very interesting and informative. It is clear that there is growing awareness of the issues involved in choosing an electricity generation strategy. However, I find the references to the raw materials for magnets for wind turbines creating pollution in China rather intriguing. While it is probably the case that a proportion of rare earth metals mined in China are used in wind turbine magnets, there are many other products that use powerful magnets. Does anyone have any information that confirms that wind turbines could be the major user as seems to be implied in some of the posts here?
>>Sal Minella says: February 14, 2011 at 4:25 pm
>>How about this theory: Windmills are causing “apparent
>>global warming”.
You might be right. Here is a windelec farm creating clouds:
http://www.treehugger.com/offshore-wind-farm-clouds-wake-photo1.jpg
http://www.windbyte.co.uk/ims/index/wake_effect_horns_rev.jpg
These clouds act like aircraft contrails, and keep in the warmth of the seas, so they never get a chance to cool. So we shall get rampant Global Warming and we will all die.
And I have heard that evil forces in the CIA and Mossad are seeding these contrails with chemicals, so these are actually CHEMTRAILS, designed to extinguish whole cities over night. And some of these wind farms are mobile – so they may tow one into place off the coast of New York overnight, without you even knowing.
I think all windelecs should be chopped down immediately.
/sarc.
>>Rocky
>>Andrea Rossi, one of the inventors of the E-Cat, stated “I estimate
>>that the cost of energy made with this system will be below 1 cent/kWh
Yeah, year, where have we heard that before. If the E-cat device was really producing 12kw, that room would be stinking hot.
My bet, is that we shall never see a working E-cat on the market. Any takers?
.
Ralph says:
February 15, 2011 at 1:03 am
Easy bet, Ralph; slam dunk.
Before you agree, however, you should consider the following reports:
http://www.examiner.com/breakthrough-energy-in-national/cold-fusion-getting-hot-with-10kw-heater-prepping-for-market
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/
Base your subjective opinion on whether the demonstration got unbearably hot or not if you want, but most facilities I’ve been in have sufficient ventilation to take care of any such problem. But from the first article above, consider the following:
According to a Rossi-Focardy paper (p. 4 of 9), similar results have been obtained in the factory of EON in Bondeno (Ferrara, Italy) in a test performed with ENEL spa on June, 25th 2009; as well as in tests made in Bedford, New Hampshire (USA) in a lab of LTI with the presence of the U.S. Department of Energy (November 19 2009) and of the U.S. Department of Defense (November 20 2009).
Production of the E-Cat is happening right now in the United States–Miami, Florida to be specific. The company is jumping through all the necessary regulatory hoops in order to achieve success. And I have sufficient personal privileged information that taking your bet is a “piece of cake”, Ralph. The amount of the wager is personal satisfaction that the process is real, marketable, applicable, and revolutionary.
Excellent idea from Wayne Job. Use the wind turbines to pump water. Especially in California, which desperately needs more reservoirs for plain old water storage! The hydro power would be a bonus.
FD or anyone suggesting that various home generation devices that allow people to go off-grid might be an answer ….
Yep, might be in some parts of the world but where the occupation density and property sizes are small enough that even storing 2 weeks of waste between collections becomes a problem some of the fancier solutions are really not very practical.
However, if you do own enough land – say a large farm or an Estate in Scotland that you never visit (for those in Europe) you can indeed obtain significant benefit from your own personal alternative energy investment. In the case of the very rich they just build a wind farm and take the subsidies available of go Solar on the farm building and get paid a large amount for using the electricity produced. See, it is possible to have your cake and eat it!
But who really pays?
The EU is proposing to invest 1Trillion euros in energy by 2020 and produce a saving for each household of around 180billion euros [this doesn’t make sense] (EU version of those numbers) by that time. This investment will also create 5 million jobs, they say. At the same time demand will be reduced by 20% due to ‘efficiencies’.
So you find to the tune of a trillion, introduce an overhead of 5 million jobs to satisfy a 20% reduced demand and then claim you will cut the cost of energy.
Hmm.
So, which economists have they consulted for that idea? Stern? Krugman? A clerk with a dodgy calculator in a basement office in Brussels?
Next: “How to feed the world with a few stale loaves and a couple of fish.”
The UK model for wind is based on a fixed payment for output generation. That sets a base price for all electricity as wind is a large enough theoretical contributor. The base rate is doubled if the ‘farm’ is off shore. I’m not sure (as I type) of the current payment (from tax via consumer bills) but it just about doubles the value of the output on land and trebles is off-shore. Producers could, in theory, sell at zero price and still make a profit. That suggests they would be keen to be operating at every opportunity – so why are the outputs registered so often so far from anywhere near the expected ‘optimum’ outputs?
We may get to the truth once the lights start to go out a few years from now.
I’ll go with the “Power Game of Pigs” posted way above.
To Charles Opalek,
I disagree with your assertion that all alternative energy technologies take more energy to build than they save. I base this on my knowledge in this field gained over the last 40 years that includes: 1) author of 2 books on Solar and Wind Engineering 2) work on the first major wind farm in Tehachapi Mountains for Zond Systems (now GE Wind 3) development of advanced concentrating photovoltaic systems in conjunction with my company and Boeing 4) experience as VP of a solar thermal company.
“”””” W. Falicoff says:
February 15, 2011 at 9:08 am
To Charles Opalek,
I disagree with your assertion that all alternative energy technologies take more energy to build than they save. I base this on my knowledge in this field gained over the last 40 years that includes: 1) author of 2 books on Solar and Wind Engineering 2) work on the first major wind farm in Tehachapi Mountains for Zond Systems (now GE Wind 3) development of advanced concentrating photovoltaic systems in conjunction with my company and Boeing 4) experience as VP of a solar thermal company. “””””
Well I’ll take your word for it. I presume that your energy budget analysis, did include all of the energy that was used by profit making enterprises in coming up with the profits and taxes, that were used to pay the tax subsidies on these “alternative energies” That you have been working with.
So if I have one of your wind farms, and I put a fence around it so no clandestine resupply missions can come in and interfere; how long does it take to grow a duplicate of that wind farm; using just the energy that it supplies, and of course the raw materials of the universe in their natural state ?
If ANY alternative energy plant can duplicate itself using only its own energy; to gather ALL of the materials and do all the work required; then we know for sure, that it really is an alternative energy source; and not an energy wasting scheme; so the “Doubling Time” is a fair measure of the efficacy of ANY “energy source”.
“”””” Dave Springer says:
February 14, 2011 at 8:36 pm
@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.”
…………………..
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. “””””
Dave, there’s av ery interesting “solar heated” house design, that has been around for quite a few years; and a number of them have been built in the lake Tahoe area. I suspect the design was first publicised in Popular Mechanics. The house has a house within a house construction; well at least it is sort of double roofed. It has a high glass wall south facing wall (northern hemi), and a downward sloping roof towards the north (not steep), nad there is about a foot or so air gap between that weather proofing roof, and the inner “ceiling”. Air can flow freely up the tall glass wall, and flow through the gap to the north of the house, where it drops inside a double wall into the basement. The basement is a deep pit full of scoria; porous volcanic rock, that has lots of air pockets, and surface. The air, which was heated by the sun trapping glass on the south wall, goes down into those rocks and warms the rocks, and the air returns through the floor at the south wall. All just convective flow of course. The south wall is actually an Atrium, where you can put your tropical plants etc.
When the sun goes down and the south wall starts to cool, the hot air in the basment can rise at the shorter North wall, and over the roof to the cooling glass atrium.
Even in a place like lake Tahoe, there is sufficient sunshine to keep the house properly warmed without any auxilliary heat.
My understanding, is that the first such house built up there could not get a loan to build the house, without some built in auxilliary heater; so the put a pot belly stove inside the house (wood burning) and the lender ok’d that.
The solar heating worked so well, that they basically never used the wood stove; and subsequently people could get a loan without the auxilliary heat requirement.
The hot rocks approach is probably better than the water tank approach, since you don’t have to deal with the excessive moisture. I’m sure that you can also use both, and have solar input to your house hot water supply. Certainly hot enough for any ablutions; and then you can use flash heaters for dish washing and the like.
There’s no doubt that in many climates like California, it is possible to go completely off grid; and tell the PG&Es of the world to “Shove it!”. And being off grid lets you run low Voltage LED lighting if you want; who needs 60 Hertz, or even 50 for that matter.
For the problem of batteries for wind/solar, forget lead acid. The future is the past. Nickel-iron batteries, aka Edison cells or Edison batteries, work very well.
Obligatory Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-iron_battery
See here first:
http://www.nickel-iron-battery.com/
They last a very long time. Made for the original electric cars of the early twentieth century, before the First World War, and there are remaining ones still working. Made in the US until 1975 when Exide Battery Corp, who had bought the Edison company in 1972, killed them off in favor of their lead acid batteries. They are very tolerant of overcharging and deep discharging, every five to twenty years you change the potassium hydroxide electrolyte rather than replace the battery. Expect at least 20 years, to 40 or more. Great for daily charging/discharging. Definitely Better For The Environment than lead acid, nickel cadmium, and virtually anything else out there.
Downsides: Bulk, larger than modern lead acid. Ordering delay, from China (bulk purchase by supplier) or made-in-USA (Zapp Works, new maker) of one to several months. Cost? Up front, yes, long term, no.
There is much growing interest in them for home solar and wind power installations, and apparently a lot of customer satisfaction. Worth reading about.
==========
Future of Wind Power
GE, major promoter and supplier of wind turbines and related equipment, has been doing a lot of work to set themselves up for lots of work with Big Petroleum:
Deal gives GE a crown jewel of the oil industry
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0298323c-3878-11e0-959c-00144feabdc0.html (registration required?)
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/Deal-gives-GE-crown-jewel-oil-ftimes-3601958230.html?x=0&.v=1
Quite a portfolio they’re building up, which certainly indicates they expect to be making lots of money from fossil fuels for quite some time to come.
Do you think that indicates we’re going to transition to wind power from oil and gas anytime soon?
Side Note: From the article:
Two thirds of what’s used comes from where two thirds is still left? How do they define “highly depleted” anyway? When does that “Peak Oil” kick in?
Anthony, here is another story:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Northern+Brunswick+wind+turbines+frozen+solid/4287063/story.html
Dave Springer says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:58 pm
” You’re still paying for the cost of capital (which isn’t much for coal)”
Have you priced a coal plant lately?
Here is the Sunflower project in Kansas, 895 megawatt for $2.24 billion.
http://www.sunflower.net/documents/2010EconomicImpactStudy.pdf
Here is a coal plant in Mississippi, $2.9 billion for 582 MW
https://enr.construction.com/engineering/subscription/LoginSubscribe.aspx?cid=14671
Here is one in Indiana, $2.9 billion for 620 MW.
http://www.steelguru.com/raw_material_news/New_Indiana_coal_plant_cost_up_to_USD_3_billion_-_Duke_Energy/141755.html
Here is one in Illinois, $3.5 billion for 716 MW.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-06/illinois-senate-rejects-clean-coal-plant-support-update1-.html
“”””” Baron Scarpia says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:17 am
Way too much misinformation and exaggeration on this blog…
……………………………..
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. “””””
So Coal, Oil, Nuclear, and Natural Gas are ALL Government subsidized “Energy sources” ? I didn’t see Hydro power in that list; but what is in the list covers virtually all of the US (at least) Energy supply.
So unless I don’t understand the Physics of Perpetual Motion machines; that means that Hydro-powered energy must be subsidizing everthing else.
I know for sure that there were no “Government Subsidies of energy” back when we were all clambering around in Fig trees, spending every waking minute, gather ing free clean green renewable alternative energy, from those figs.
Somehow; god knows how; we managed to bootstrap our fig tree energy supply up to today’s massive energy and industrial enterprises; it certainly wasn’t done with Government subsidies; since Government by definition is a non-profit enterprise; it has no lawful means of support; except by stealing from those who create what we made out of our fig trees energy.
So Baron, please explain to us, just how it is that hydro-electric alone; unsubsidized, is able to create all of that energy unprofitable Coal, and Oil, and Nuclear, and Natural Gas that we have come to depend on; but which you say is subsidized.
Energy profitable enterprise does NOT need to be subsidized; only energy losing schemes do.
Some actual real concrete examples of the Government subsidies for those energy losing propositions would be helful, if you could post a short list of them here.
Who or what is E-cat ??
“”””” Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
February 14, 2011 at 1:02 pm
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. “””””
Charles,
Many years ago; make that many, many years ago, I proposed, in a Letter (published) to the Harvard Business Review; a simple test of Energy Alternative Sources. The test was very simple:-
Tell me what YOUR favorite alternative energy source is; shall we say; cow dung fired steam turbines in say Banglasdesh, and tell me what peak generating capacity you would like; why not One GWatt max capacity; and how much total energy generating fuel supply you would like to begin operations with; how about ten TWatt-hrs.
So I will GIVE you, free and clear, a One GWatt Cow dung Steam Turbine plant located on your site in Bangladesh (or wherever); and I will also give you free and clear a supply of ten TWatt-hrs worth of prime cow dung, to get your operations started; go out and knock yourself out and get filthy rich. See I just solved all your economics hesitations about investing in cow dung steam power; so don’t raise that issue again.
OOoops !! I almost forgot; you see I am not really all that altruistic; I need a favor from you before you go and retire on the Riviera.
I would like you to build me a duplicate of the plant I just gave you; a one GWattt Cow Dung Steam Turbine plant; and I would like you to replace the mountain of dungfuel I gave you; so that I too, can get filthy rich, and retire to the Riviera.
So you have at your disposal; all the energy that your BanglaDung Plant, can generate; plus all of the raw materials in the universe; just where Mother Gaia put them all, in their natural state. So you need to use some of your energy to go and round up the materials; dig in the ground for the stuff you see. Don’t forget you will need to make a bulldozer to go digging around for materials; and probably some other tools as well; so you make them with your energy.
Somebody will have to drive the dozer. Well everybody already is busy with a job; you will need to get some more with your dungpower, and you will have to house and feed them and their children and put them through school, using your energy; well not unlike how we got from the fig trees to the Nuclear power station; all bootstrapped on the energy we already had available.
Well after you have delivered me a duplicate plant and a mountain of dung, then you can sell what energy you have left (if any) and get rich, so you can retire to the riviera.
Well we know it can be done; because we already did it; probably with some dungplants too, but not necessarily steam turbined.
And it was all done without any currency inflation from Government inputs of printed paper money; because there wasn’t any such thing when we did the first few generations of advanced fig power supplies.
If your favorite alternative energy source can’t duplicate itself by itself; then it is an energy wasting scheme; and should be nipped in the bud.
And Chasmod; this is certified spelling error free.
George E. Smith said February 15, 2011 at 3:56 pm:
A name that’s apparently been recently attached to RockyRoad’s favorite “alternative energy source” that he’s been promoting and defending.
I’ll mention the disclaimer to the following WUWT post up front. Anthony gave Ric Werme permission to do this essay, therefore (my words) “This post does not necessarily reflect the views of the blog owner.”
Cold Fusion Going Commercial!?
Posted on January 22, 2011
Baron Scarpia said:
Third, regarding the visual impact, have you seen a strip mine coal field or the pollution generated from a coal-fired power plant? Not pretty either. Wind power produces no stench, pollution, toxic chemicals or mercury, greenhouse gases, nor does it use precious water in dry climates. Indeed, agriculture and energy are constantly at odds about regions’ water budgets. Water guzzled from conventional power plants reduces what can be used to produce food. Wind is one energy source that does not threaten ag needs.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Well, Baron, actually I lived amongst four very large coal powered plants just west of Edmonton, Alberta, surrounding one of the nicest recreation areas in the province. Hate to tell you this, but hardly anyone notices them. The overburden piles hide the mines from public view, the plants emit a bit of steam and increase the local snowfall a bit. Other than that, they are much nicer that the visual atrocities in the Altamont Pass in California and all the hill tops in southern Idaho and northern Nevada or the ones near Pincher Creek in Alberta. NOW THOSE THINGS have a visual impact. Even the most horrible polluting coal powered stations in Poland that I had an opportunity to visit in the 90’s were not visually disturbing. They needed pollution abatement technology from the west, but visually, you hardly ever saw them as they were hidden behind well landscaped overburden piles that I initially thought were natural hills. Only David Suzuki who charters planes to fly over these sites and take pictures and tells people that they are bad sees the extent of the mining, and there is actually constant reclamation. Don’t buy into what Suzuki and his ilk tell you. They are visual media experts. They can make a toad into a star. Reality is not part of their world.
And don’t tell me about wind power and “Ag needs”. We have a local revolt from the farmers on that issue in this province. That comment is a total joke, we’ll go back to running our old “light plants” before we accept another doubling of our electricity prices to pay for “Premier Don Quixote’s” windmill projects … but oh yeah – he just realized how angry the public is about his policies and resigned before the voters turfed him out.
Wayne Delbeke, P. Eng. and farmer
To George E. Smith and Charles Opalek, PE,
The paper by E. Alsema, titled “Energy Requirements and CO2 Mitigation Potential of PV Systems,” provides a reasonable estimate of the amount of energy it takes to build PV panels and the so-called “energy payback time”.
See it at
igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/copernicus/2006-0308-200117/98054.pdf
The numbers in the paper are conservative as the cost of building thin film PV is going down. (Although existing technologies use some rare elements that are not in large supply on this planet. Also the Chinese currently control most of the world’s production of the so-called “rare earths”.) Energy payback for a sunny climate is on the order of 2 years.
See also
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
MikeinAppalachia – Bingo !