Blown promises

Yes, but when the European Union rules shut down our coal-fired power stations and the price of electricity rockets to 50 pence per unit the windmill will break even in only, oh, about fifty years. Brilliant! And it won’t matter if it’s not windy because we won’t be able to afford electricity anyway.

“on a blustery day”?
How much more efficient, if they were to mount it inside the counsel’s meeting room[!]
Maybe they should mount it in a chimney, exiting the ceiling above them… surely they would achieve virtual perpetual motion[!!]
Oh oh oh! Mount one to each of their cars and they can each drive around, collecting all the FREE wind energy they want[!]

45-125 year payback for a device that most likely won’t survive 10 years. Government folly at its peak.

Do these Sustainable & Economic Regenration people ever actually look at the results and projections in support of these monstrosities..?
A payback time of 250 years for instance..?
A 200 foot eyesore which, ‘in blustery conditions, COULD power 20000 homes’..?
And the other 90% of the time..?
When will this madness stop..?

If the data comes from guvment, national or local, don’t trust it, especially when it promises big, much savings, lower costs, better efficiency, etc!

I think the information should be checked before jumping to any conclusions. 209kWh is not enough to keep a standard 3kW electric fire going for 3 days. The figures must have been misquoted.

Wind and hot air.
Councils are good at that.
How many Kw do you think one installed over the council chamber would generate?
Our countryside is dotted with these white elephants which will never last long enough to cover their installation and payback costs.
My only hope is that they will leave them up as a monument to PC thinking and South-Sea Bubble mentality for our grandchildren to reflect upon.

How the hell can it possibly cost 750 UK pounds to ‘monitor’ the output of the turbine?
That seems really high.

If the capital cost is factored in at say 5% interest rate I think that payback time might extend well past the lifespan of the solar system.
In Hobart, Tasmania at the moment we still have a couple of dead wind turbines on the roof of one of our gummint buildings. They operated feebly for about a month and then flaked out. They have spent the last year in a static state of semi-collapse.

So each turbine will have to run for 250 years without breaking down or requiring maintainance, just to break even.
I now have to wipe off my monitor because I was having a sip of tea when I read that.

Don R says:
April 27, 2011 at 2:00 am
A slight amendment. The cost of each turbine was £5000 plus VAT….

You beat me to it! Apparently VAT on wind turbines is 5% which puts the cost at £5,250. Sooner or later there has to be maintenance costs which puts the payback time even further.

@Jimbo..
Not to mention the total environmentakl devastation in a China where they mine and process the rare earth for the magnets. An ever expanding toxic acid lake killing the countryside for miles around, plus massive air pollution. Coal mines can, and are, often ‘remediated’,…. but this toxic lake and the surrounding area will NEVER be.
So much for “green’ technology !

Interestingly, you have to poke about on Sandwell MBC’s website to find this:-
http://www.sandwell.gov.uk/info/200105/sustainability/460/climate_change
Nothing about Council run windmills, though.
But this “Sustainable & Economic Regeneration Unit” seems to have a lot of staff.
Perhaps you’d better add their cost to the £5,000 per windmill quoted.
Payback period???
CO2 saved???
Net effect on Global Average Temperatures???
I’d be inclined to write a nice letter to the Council’s “Interim Chief Executive”, Mr. Tim Britton:-
“His salary will be £139,000 a year
“Mr Britton, who is executive director of urban regeneration, takes over the role with immediate effect.
“Cllr Cooper said: “I have full confidence in Mr Britton to carry out the role which is extremely demanding.
“”We have very good officers in Sandwell and we will carry on with a new slimmed down management structure that is planned for the future.
“”I want to maintain stability in Sandwell and ensure we have strong leadership throughout this challenging time.
“”This is going to be a period of major change across the board in local government.”
“Cllr Cooper said the move was part of a major management restructure which will see the chief exec’s salary cut from £152,174 to £139,000 and a two-year pay freeze for other top managers.”
Ask Britton (and send a copy to Cllr Cooper) asking under what powers Sandwell has decided to enter the Electricity Generation business because you are concerned that this may be Ultra Vires (as well as blatantly ineffective and poor value for money).
Point out the costs and “benefits” as set out in this posting and in comments. Say you want a list of those Councillors who approved this expenditure because you are minded to have them individually surcharged with the wasted and possibly Ultra Vires expenditure.
Make yourself a pot of tea and await a response.

Sandwell Council isn’t known for its critical thinkers or common sense. This is the council that tried to fine an elderly a four figure sum for dropping cigarette ash while waiting for a bus. Only a loud public outcry made them back down. They also don’t like advertising the sale of your car by placing a small notice in same car for passers-by to read and take note of and threaten you with a fine for doing so. They are a bunch of ridiculous, dictatorial freaks so it’s no wonder the dimwits think that wind turbines are a good idea so they are buying another one whether long suffering council tax payers want it or not.

On the plus side, the FOI response was done well and actually provided the information requested. And when there was no monitoring on the wind turbine mentioned in the original request, the government response included data from an identical turbine that was monitored instead. They not only met the letter of the FOI law with their response, but they also followed the spirit of FOIA by doing their best to provide all the information requested. This FOI response was actually helpful to the requester, rather than an exercise in government non-response doublespeak that is all too often provided after a FOIA request.
That FOI response should be an example for the Climategate scientists, provide relevant data in a FOI response even if it risks making you look foolish.

Here is SemplíceEnergy’s offer for the Bleakhouse School Micro-Wind Turbine project.
As you can see it was £5,500.00, which comes out as £5,000.00 indeed with a £500.00 discount. However, you have to add VAT (5% for wind turbines), so it is £5,250.00 so far.
Annual cost of the optional monitoring system is £250.00 (plus VAT I guess), but what Roy Mccauley of Sandwell Borough Council failed to mention in his reply to the FOI request is the fact there’s also an initial installation cost of £2,000.00 (+VAT). Therefore this toy turbine cost £8,137.50 in the first three years (assuming VAT rate for the wind turbine monitoring system is the same as for wind turbines themselves).
With a 40 year life time (which is way too high) and with no maintenance cost whatsoever, cost of electricity comes out as £2.14/kWh (including VAT).
In the document SemplíceEnergy says the Micro-Wind Turbine would potentially reduce CO₂ by 500 kg/annum. If in fact 209 kWh of electricity was generated in a year, it would work by substituting a power source that used 2.4 kg carbon to generate 1 kWh of electricity. As heat of combustion for carbon is 9.5 kWh/kg, 2.4 kg carbon would generate 22.8 kWh thermal energy if burned.
I didn’t know average thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants in Britain is 4.3%. Amazing.
/sarc off

Sorry, I have miscalculated. The 500 kg/annum is for CO₂ reduction, not carbon reduction. As molar weight of CO₂ is 3.67 times more than that of carbon, they assume a 16% thermal efficiency at the coal fired power plants to be substituted by this windmill, not 4.3%. However, it is still only about half the actual number (33%).
Which means the Bleakhouse School Micro-Wind Turbine would only reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 250 kg, which is less then CO₂ emission of a single human (by breathing).

Sandwell Council – rated one of the worst in Britain.
This is the same council that’s attempting to fine a grandmother thousands of pounds for letting her cigarette ash fall on the pavement while she waited for a bus. Sheila Martin, 70, was smoking at a bus stop when a warden pounced and handed her the £75 fixed penalty for littering. The cash-strapped gran refused to pay – and has now been warned it could rise to £2,500.
Oh! The joys of living in Sandwell!

The knee-jerk scorn persistently displayed by many commenters here over anything even vaguely greenish is disturbing, disgraceful and plain foolish; why sink to the level of the AGW types?
Read the article. Why was the small turbine installed? “Through monitoring the performance of the turbine it was hoped the council would be able to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough”. This was a very sensible course of action; for the trivial cost of £5000 (+£750 for monitoring, and noting that local authorities do not pay VAT, which is refunded) they obtain valuable data enabling them to make a more informed decision on a far larger multi-million pound project. They would have expected to have to pay much more for a feasibility study, which they would otherwise have been obliged to carry out as part of the tender and decision-making process. I doubt that anyone was relying on the micro-turbine to make a net profit for the council (though with the full feed-in tariff of 34.5p/kWh and a 25% capacity factor it could have produced revenue in excess of £1000/yr, or 20% per annum return on investment). A full-size wind turbine would be expected to have a much lower cost per unit output (though a lower feed-in-tariff price), but a similar pattern of variability. If the 209kWh is correct (and not a typo for 2090kWh), then the average capacity factor is an order of magnitude lower than one would have hoped, which would suggest that a full-scale installation would not be profitable. However, if, as I suspect, the true figure is closer to 2090kWh, then the full-scale installation would then probably be highly profitable. Bear in mind that the council is under a statutory obligation to obtain value for money for its electorate, under the commercial conditions that actually obtain (it has no control over whether or not renewables are subsidised through the feed-in-tariff, or otherwise, so whether you or they approve of these subsidies is beside the point – they cannot take that into consideration).

I am fine with putting small systems on schools for education reasons. It is stupid to expect ANY payback in real money for these systems. If they wanted to verify winds, they should have installed an anemometer for a couple hundred BEFORE committing to an install.

Here’s the one that dumbfounds me:
Say you have one of these windmills that cost about USD$9,000 – How much of that price went toward paying the energy bills at the steel mill, the aluminum recycling plant, the factory where they weave and pot the carbon fiber cloth, etc.? I’d have to guess at least 15% of the final cost of the finished product is directly traceable to the energy required to produce it. That means that (at a SWAG cost of ten cents per kWh) it took at least 13,500 kWh to build that windmill that might be expected to produce 5,000 kWh of electrical energy in its lifetime.
Here’s my idea – take the portion of my income tax that goes to funding the EPA, Department of Energy, and any other government entities that are wearing green blinders; deduct that portion from my federal income tax, and I’ll promise to flush one third of it down the toilet. The net effect will be the same, I’ll get to keep a little money, and the world will be better off.

Which nine days of the month was the 209 KWH generated? The first nine? The last nine? Every third day? Every third hour? Between half-past and 50-past each hour? Maybe three generators would provide full-time power?
How about: screw the power consumer, he’ll just have to exploit the power when it’s available and sit in anticipation when it isn’t.

@nonegatives
I am fine with putting small systems on schools for education reasons.
I’m struggling to imagine what such ‘education reasons’ might be. And why such reasons (if they exist at all) couldn’t be satisfied for a darned sight less than £5K by other means.
‘Look children.. the wind is (or as it maybe – isn’t) blowing’
Ten seconds of learning per kiddiewink. Expensive stuff.

Just watching a Dane talking about a “Floating Wind Turbine.” Ok what about sever weather. does happen. I keep wondering about the the midwest US what about the wind
power projects there?

Sal Minella says on April 27, 2011 at 7:08 am

How about: screw the power consumer, he’ll just have to exploit the power when it’s available and sit in anticipation when it isn’t.

I think you meant shiver in anticipation when it isn’t.

John Bosworth says:
April 27, 2011 at 2:23 am
A similar model over here in the states might run you about $1000. And they paid 5000 british pounds each? Somethun’ aint right…
Installation costs can be substantial on these ‘micro generation’ projects. A DIYer might be able to make the economics work out. As soon as you have to hire union scale masons to pour a concrete pad and union scale electricians to hook it all up the price becomes insane. The same goes for roof top solar panels. $1/watt for the panel, $6/watt for installation.

[snip. Off topic. ~dbs]

Typical mathematics of the labour party. Sandwell has been a labour run council since 1983.
Labour love spending other people’s money and cannot add-up numbers to save their own lives, hence why labour were running a deficit every year during the boom years in the mid 2000s. They were warned that if they did not cut their profligate spending back then during the boom, that when the bust came, (which was inevitable when borrowing was increasing every year, much faster than the rise in earnings), that their financial (mis)management would cause a massive fiscal implosion.
Now we (the people) are having repay a deficit the same size as a “black Wednesday” happening every week! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday ]
The tory government was slated in the media, the City of London’s financial markets and nationally in the homes of voters up and down the land, for the cost incurred by the tax-payer of Black Wednesday. This economic shock was enough to destroy the conservative government’s economic reputation for the next 17 years.
The last Labour maladministration created an annual deficit the size of a Black Wednesday happening every single week!
This windmill experiment seems to be more of the same labour mathematics at play.

@John shively
I find your post full of special pleading about just how flaming gormless and useless local governement officers are. In particular you say:
‘There are no unbiased consultants on wind energy in most local settings and there is no watch dog agency to protect the local government from being deceived’.
WTF I ask politely, is the purpose of Sandwell’s sustainability unit. Might we reasnably expect them to be knowledgeable about sustainability? To understand the pitfalls? And the bennies? To advise the council members about their options?
Or is it all too much for their little brainsand they need a Wathdog to keep them safe from the Big Bad World Anyway in Sandwell they are probably too busy passing out fines for littering to be able to spend even ten minutes educating themselves about wind power. They are only council officers after all.
In case they are reading now (it is 16:15 in UK so they’ve probably all gone home, but I’ll give it a go), here is Uncle Lat’s Guide to Wind Power for Council Officers:
1. It Doesn’t Work.
2. Don’t Do It
3. In case of doubt return to 1.
So simple even a sustainability officer can understand. Capice?

DJ says:
April 27, 2011 at 7:11 am
“The 209 kWh is not a typo, and for a 33ft system well within what we’d expect given the performance of similar systems observed elsewhere.”
How do you know it’s not a typo? Have you asked the original writer of the FOI response, or seen the raw data from the monitoring? 209kWh/yr is far below the output that would be expected for a 1.8m dia (1kW) wind turbine on a 10m tower. If it is really that low, then that is a surprising result well worth the small amount of money it has cost the council to obtain it.
“We note you say “….as I suspect….the full-scale installation would be highly profitable.” If that were true, then there’d be windmills of that scale already in production, and not due to government subsidies, but private investment. A 20% ROI??? I’d be all over that!”
There are many wind turbines of all scales in operation in the UK. I have no reason to believe that they are not profitable, and, from the rate at which new ones are being built, despite the difficulty and costs of getting planning permission, have every reason to believe that they are. Not necessarily with a 20% return (that figure was for a small domestic scale device, where the feed-in-tariff is highest). Whether built and operated by a private company, or by a local authority, their profitability has to be calculated in the world as it actually is, not as you might wish it to be; good or bad, the regulatory structure is part of that real world. Moreover, taxes, subsidies and regulatory intervention are so ubiqitous throughout our economy that it is literally impossible to disentangle them and determine what the respective free market prices would be in their absence.

Latimer Alder says:
April 27, 2011 at 7:32 am
“If the purpose of the installation was to assess the feasibility of wind power in Sandwell, it has spectacularly failed.”
Why do you say that? If it has demonstrated that it is infeasible, it has succeeded. It has also succeeded if has demonstrated that a full scale installation would be profitable. Either way, it has done what it was intended to do – generate information.
“Which might explain why the council was obliged to fund it themselves, rather than negotiating a free trial scheme with a potential supplier for the full sized scheme. (Try and buy). The suppliers know where wind will be even remotely sensible, saw the council coming and wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.”
First off, even if manufacturers had such a “free” scheme (which so far as I’m aware they don’t, because the domestic and industrial scale turbines are manufactured by different firms), it would have cost the council considerably more than the titchy £5000 they did spend to arrange it. Nor would this have been a legally permissible approach, unless, after the trial, the council were free to put out the proposed installation to full competitive tender without unlawfully favouring the trial firm.

jon shively says:
“The trial experiment by the local government to find out whether the construction of a large windmill is practical seems like a good idea. But shouldn’t the people who market the wind turbines have that data?”
No, not really. Unless they’ve previously installed turbines in that location (and maybe not even then) they won’t know what the local wind climate is like. And, as you point out, such information is proprietary and biased anyway. The onus is on the customer to do his own survey and cost-benefit analysis.

“Bleakhouse Primary School”?
Somebody dig up Dickens. He needs to sue.

@paul birch
First off, even if manufacturers had such a “free” scheme (which so far as I’m aware they don’t, because the domestic and industrial scale turbines are manufactured by different firms), it would have cost the council considerably more than the titchy £5000 they did spend to arrange it.
So not only are council ‘sustainability officers’ not expected to be able to understand anythign about the technologies of sustainability, their counterparts in negotiations aren’t capable of cutting a good deal with suppliers either. But then they are only local government officers anyway.
Three hints..
1 If there is more than one supplier.. you get them BOTH to give you try and buy. If not, you can’t do an open tender anyway.
2. If a supplier won’t offer try and buy don’t do business with him. He’s putting nothing into the game to make a success of it.
3. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The supplier takes the upfront risk and gets it back through the life of the contract.
In next week’s instalment of Uncle Lat’s helpful hints….
Elementary commerce for ‘public servants’
To cover: accounts, audits, negotiating, cash, revenue, cashflow, doing deals …and all those scary nasty things you hear about on the telly. No matter how long you’ve worked for the government you know that one day you’ll have to understand them a bit. They won’t go away.

The ‘physical presence’ was to brainwash the children – what are 5, 6 and 7 year olds going to learn about physics, meteorology etc etc.
The question that should have been be asked is how the council could so blatantly steamroller their own planning permission rules. Mr Joe Public would not have a proverbial snowball’s chance of erecting something like that in his own private back yard/garden.
There would be endless complaints about ‘noise’, ‘flicker’, ‘loss of amenity’ (the view), possible/imagined distraction to motorists. The list is endless.
The two most important things that The Council would have certainly used to stall Joe Public would have been…..
1. The distraction part of it, its bad enough doing ‘the school run’ without a flickering noisy monster going on up in the sky..
2. The risks. Its not worth thinking about a piece of machinery, rotating at high speed descending into a school-yard full of 5 year olds.
That’s what they should have been asked – how did they justify that?

Paul Birch says (April 27, 2011 at 6:36 am): ‘Read the article. Why was the small turbine installed? “Through monitoring the performance of the turbine it was hoped the council would be able to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough”.’
Um, Paul, on the WUWT site is an ad for assorted weather equipment, including this wind logger
http://www.weathershop.com/rainwisewl.htm
“designed to meet the needs of people considering the purchase of a wind turbine”, advertised for $315. No doubt the council has access to similar equipment locally. Call me crazy, but wouldn’t such a unit have given pretty much the same answer as the much more expensive “wind logger” actually installed?
BTW, weather monitoring equipment is also “educational”, though perhaps not as sexy as a part-time wind turbine/part-time sculpture.

Sandwell, the “loony left” comes to mind. I don’t know what colour they are now but politicians of all colours are expert at wasting other peoples money.
http://www.expressandstar.com/latest/2009/04/27/250-blackberries-for-72-councillors/
“Councillors in a Black Country borough are set to be offered Blackberry mobile phones free in a move which could cost taxpayers £18,000.
An independent panel is recommending a £250 Blackberry for any of the 72 Dudley councillors who requests one. The council has alreadyshelled out £16,000 on 64 Blackberries for housing managers.
The recommendation is published in a report on councillors’ allowances to be considered on Thursday”
A story from 2009

@Gary Young hladik
You said it all! A weather station for the children (now that really would provide some sensible education about all sorts of things and is much to be recommended!) and a windmill predictor all for less than £200. Even I would view that as good value for the taxpayer. And a primary school science teacher could set it all up as a class project. Bingo!
Instead we have employed at least one Sustainability Officer (£50K pa??) and paid 20 times over the odds for something that does far less.
Sorry -forgot – we got 20 quid’s worth of free electric.
Another triumph for our ‘public servants’ and the green movement. Only £5000+VAT+ £50000-£20 = £55,980 completely wasted.
When will they ever learn…….

Smokey says:
April 27, 2011 at 9:41 am
“We can’t all be selling each other electricity that is priced far above its production cost.
Final result: you will no longer receive your subsidy.”
He will, but the value of the money he gets will be much lower.

Kum Dollison says:
April 27, 2011 at 11:11 am
Your Wiki reference has an interesting definition of ‘capacity factor’ – try nameplate capacity – not actual generated capacity. Please note that Iowa did not install any additional capacity in 2010 – sounds like they hit the proverbial real world ‘capacity limiter’

dave ward – and obviously, as one can tell from the flag, the turbine is stationary and producing sweet FA…

This is how I see wind power.

Okay, when all else fails, do the research. It seems like Iowa generates about 52 Million Megawatt Hrs (According to EIA.)
It looks like they’re producing 10.7 Million Megawatt Hrs of Wind, which would be about 20.6%.
http://www.state.ia.us/government/com/util/energy/wind_generation.html

On P4 of Semplice’s offer [found & linked by Berényi Péter 05:53am], they guess / hope / predict (with not financial penalty if they’re over-optimistic), that the turbine has a “Total potential annual energy production of around 1400 kWh per annum.” [Two, cumulative, fudge factors!]
If the turbine has actually only produced 209 kWh, then there should be a case for mis-selling & a full refund.

Latimer Alder says:
“… ”
… a lot of irrelevancies that show you don’t understand the tender process that councils are legally obliged to follow, nor how expensive that process is for large projects; and furthermore that you either ignored or failed to grasp what I said in the previous comment.

Smokey says:
“If windmills are so efficient, we should eliminate the subsidies. But that would, of course, eliminate the windmill industry.”
I never claimed that they were efficient (although in point of fact the efficiency of a wind turbine can be close to 100% – which has almost no bearing on their suitability as power generators), only that they can be profitable for their operators (whether private individuals, private companies, or public bodies). This is a fact, whether you like it or not, or whether or not you think it would be the case in some hypothetical alternative universe in which their were no taxes, subsidies or regulatory burdens. And if they are profitable, it is not irrational for councils to consider installing them. The questions of subsidies are decided on national or supranational levels; local authorities have no power to change them, and blaming them for taking advantage of them is foolish. They have to budget the way things currently are, not how they might be under some different political regime; if they fail to do so, wantonly or negligently, individual councillors can be prosecuted and fined.

We have 5 large turbines within 7 miles of where I live, they are situated at Rainworth near mansfield Nottinghamshire UK, it is rare to see all 5 spinning at the same time, can someone explain.

Paul Birch says (April 27, 2011 at 3:17 pm): “I doubt if it would make much difference to the overall cost, which at such a small scale is dominated by the installation and monitoring costs, not the simple hardware price.”
Um, Paul, you don’t think it would be a lot cheaper to install an off-the-shelf logger than a wind turbine? Even assuming it costs the same to monitor? BTW, note from the FOI response that the council was willing to give up data to save the relatively small cost of monitoring a second turbine, when according to your argument, it wouldn’t be worthwhile. WUWT?
“Also, a wind logger (which was probably included in their monitoring setup at the school) doesn’t by itself tell you how a real turbine will react to that wind.”
Not directly, but it will predict the turbine’s expected performance, given its advertised specifications. Judging by the turbine’s dismal output, a wind logger alone would have settled the issue (unless of course the council bought defective turbines, in which case it should get a refund). Note that the council could have passed a two-step plan (phase 1: check wind; phase 2: install test turbines only if phase 1 successful) with the same (apparently arduous) bureaucratic effort, and saved a bundle.

Forget the savings! The wind turbine released co2 in its manufacture!!! How long before it is re-couped? Then let’s add the cost, maintenance, VAT etc. What a SCAM.

Kum Dollison, Using the very source you quoted, 3.7 GW of installed capacity at 19 per cent capacity factor is less than 6 TWH, not the 10.7 you claimed (3.7 GW x 0.19 x 8760 hours/year).
Of course Iowa rates haven’t gone up significantly. Wind is still a trivial part of its electric energy supply, something very different from installed capacity.
Your note on Australian thermal coal prices is irrelevant. It’s being driven up by demand from China and India. Such demand is NOT applicable in either Western Europe or the USA. Coal is not a unified global commodity price the way oil is, particularly not thermal coal.
And they should have lots of opposition to transmission line construction. Wind on the system means chronically underloaded lines, as you have to build them to take the full capacity but on average will deliver only a small fraction of that. And what you wind advocates never factor in is the additional T&D cost of wind compared to high capacity factor sources.
Paul Birch, pretty it up however you like. The fact remains you spent taxpayer money on a useless scheme that has no useful output. It serves only to collect government subsidies and, as noted by others earlier, add to the fuel cost and burn of the fossil fleet. Do try to learn what “hot standby” means. Read Richard Courtney’s post again. You clearly didn’t understand it. Your savings have simply been someone else’s much great expenses.
And what do you mean by “close to 100% efficiency”? Utter nonsense. First there are the thermal losses from the blades. Then the real killer. All the energy has to be transmitted through a mechanical gearbox. Huge losses, on the order of 30-50%. And you have to convert the mechanical rotation into electric current. More heat losses.
In terms of basic physics, your statement is meaningless. You should also be aware of the detailed specifications provided by manufacturers such as Vesta. They specify that the designed 20 year life span is only achieved by a capacity factor of 70% or less. It’s in their technical spec’s. Engineers know this stuff; you obviously don’t.
And remember, you spent all this money on a 1 kW machine. Big deal. You powered about two to three rooms. Do you plan to power an entire school by spending 20 to 30 times that amount? The typical person in an industrial civilization consumes between 5-7 MWh per year, and this little toy makes about 1.5-2 MWh per year and I’m being unreasonably optimistic here. Given the poor performance of the micros compared with the 1-2.5 MW machines, it’s probably much less.
Jimbo, on a per installed kW basis, a large wind turbine uses approximately four times the concrete and six times the steel of a nuclear plant. Because of the scaling factors, the ratios for micro-turbines are worse. For a coal-fired plant the disadvantage for wind in construction material inputs is roughly the same except for less concrete and more steel than a nuclear plant. The difference between the coal and nuclear is largely the coal plant’s fuel handling system and the nuclear plant’s concrete containment structure. Given a maximum 20 year operating life, at an optimistic capacity factor of 20%, the carbon dioxide inputs for wind are probably never recovered. Given the very high degradation rates for offshore wind, they never will be. In the case of a nuclear plant, its carbon cost of construction, like its energy input, is recovered in about two years of nominal operation.

Iowa Residential Rates seem to be going up about $8.00/mo, on average. They give “adding additional renewable energy” as being 20% of that. That means Wind Power has added about $1.,60/Mo to the average residential bill.
I guess they’re figuring 33.3% because of their experience, to date. EIA said 14% for 2009; I’m sticking with 20% for 2010.
Don’t kid yourself about coal. We export about 4% of our production, and we import some Australian Thermal Coal. The more China is willing to pay, the more Philadelphia will, eventually, pay. Those train tracks out of Wy run East AND West.

Some of you guys are just making up numbers. This wind farm at Altamont Pass has the smallest, oldest, least efficient wind turbines just about anywhere on Earth, and they’re still putting out 20%, and they’ve been running for thirty years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm
It seems very likely that those Iowans know what they’re doing when they state 33%. And, if those old 100 kw turbines at Altamont Pass can still be going strong after 30 Years, I have a hard time seeing how the New ones won’t.

Gary Hladik says:
April 27, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Paul Birch says (April 27, 2011 at 3:35 pm): “No, but I am a local town councillor, so I know how much it costs to get these things done in reality. £5K +£750 for monitoring is a very good deal. And I repeat, local authorities do not pay VAT.”
“I just looked back at the FoI response. According to Roy Mccauley of the Sandwell Borough Council, the cost of one wind turbine (Taylor’s Lane) was £5,ooo “plus VAT”. WUWT?”
When local authorities purchase goods and services from VAT-registered firms, the invoiced amount includes VAT. The local authority then claims back this VAT from HM Revenue and Customs. There is no cost to the local authority or council tax payers. As far as councils’ net budgeting is concerned, they do not pay VAT.

@paul birch
I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure. Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%. So why do people find it so hard to accept that it could be a simple typo?
Why do you find it so hard to accept that it is not correct? More than likely the sustainability officer put the device in a place where there isn’t a lot of wind. Maybe Oldbury just isn’t a windy place.
Still – that was the whole purpose of the experiment. Perhaps they can now get back to what councils are good at…fining people for feeding the ducks or putting out the wrong recycling bin on a Tuesday or any of the other useful things that the bureaucrats like to turn their tiny minds to.
And with wind power being proved to be a complete non-starter they can get rid of their ‘sustainability officer’ as well. Or get him to help working on the bins.

Kum Dollison: “And, if those old 100 kw turbines at Altamont Pass can still be going strong after 30 Years, I have a hard time seeing how the New ones won’t.”
Now you really are making things up. You clearly have no idea as to how many of them have been abandoned because of mechanical breakdown. The link you posted supports nothing of what you claimed.
“…and we import some Australian Thermal Coal.”
Source please. The US is a net exporter of coal.

Reading Paul Birch’s comments scares the help out of me if he’s a councillor spending my taxes.
He can not and will not accept this was a complete and total waste of money and my guess would be if he was in charge he’d happily spend my money the same way again, proper scary, no learn capacity.
Paul I don’t want to spead any dispersions but are you a left learning socialist by any chance? It’s just the flippant way you can spend my money.

Pah..! Don’t talk to me about local government spending our money…
Here in Cambridge (UK) our county council thought it would be a good idea (‘green’, don’t you know) to build a busway (concrete tracks) along an old railway track to the small town of St Ives, thus (in theory at least) getting buses off the overloaded highway known as the A14.
SO FAR, against a budget of £116 million, it has cost £180 million. It is two-and-a-half years late – and hasn’t opened yet.
Best bit – when I e-mailed them to enquire what would be the (negative) impact on bus services into the city via the old approach route, they DIDN’T KNOW, and wouldn’t until the bus companies submitted their traffic plans.
Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that before they started, the council would know PRECISELY what routes and frequencies were going to use this new super-highway..?
No heads have rolled, needless to say – press reports of meetings on the project seem to comprise councillors congratulating each other on the management of the scheme…
Local ellections here on 5th May…..

Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:42 am
“Sorry – your continued pleading…”
I’m not pleading. I’m attacking ignorance and unscientific bigotry.
“Let’s remind ourselves of what was trying to be acheived. A very simple task. Find out how much the wind blows over the course of a year in a particular location in Oldbury.”
No, it wasn’t. What was to be achieved was “to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough”. They are very different things. Logging windspeed is only part of that – and even this is a lot more difficult and expensive than you imagine. Ten metre masts aren’t cheap, can’t simply be bought at the local ironmongers, and require specialist installation. Then you have to find a location for the mast, and a safe location for the PC, apply for planning permission, subcontract for the electricity supply, subcontract for the installation of the PC, the logger and the necessary software, and for regular inspection to reboot the PC if it crashes, etc., etc..
“I guarantee it will get planning permission without problems.”
You’d be surprised. If it’s painted the wrong colour you’ll get a storm of protests (we had that problem with a CCTV antenna mast, which was black instead of blue-grey).
“And best of all the benighted ‘sustainability officer’ is being paid for anyway. His time is effectively free.”
Hardly. He will have many other calls on his time, and a lot of the issues will be outside his area of expertise or authority, so he will have to liase with many other officers and departments, such as Highways and Legal, and of course the relevant council committee(s).
“If you bought the useless £5,000 device instead of the £200 useful device none of the above stages would change. It would just be £4,800 cheaper. The expenditure of taxpayers money would be £4,800 less. You would have saved money. Less would have gone out.”
No, the £5000 stated to be the total cost, including installation. Now the catalogue price for an equivalent mast, bought separately, is about £3000 (£2999.98!). The catalogue prices for turbines come in around £1000/kW (in range 400W-2.2kW). It’s hard to see the foundations costing less than £1000 to lay (and probably more). So buying it all as a bundle quite clearly saved money. Your approach would cost more and provide less useful information.
“If in your council, your own sustaianbility officers”
We don’t have any. We have only two employees; the Town Clerk and the Assistant Town Clerk. We manage our own projects (and put in a lot of unpaid work), so we know all too well how these things work and how much things cost.

Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:48 am
@paul birch
I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure. Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%. So why do people find it so hard to accept that it could be a simple typo?
“Why do you find it so hard to accept that it is not correct?”
Why do you find it so hard to read what I wrote? “Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%.” There is no way that figure can be correct unless something was very wrong with the school’s turbine (when the experiment would need to be redone using the other turbine instead). It would be very hard to find anywhere with a wind shadow this deep.

Paul Birch, no, installations around the world do not routinely produce 20-30 per cent. to cite just one example, the Gaspe projects of Hydro Quebec have never produced better than 19 per cent despite having one of the most favourable wind regimes on the continent.
Your efficiency claims are still rubbish. I explained to you above where the heat losses occur.
Kum, yes, it’s a blend of coal. What you don’t say is how much relative to the total.

@Paul Birch
‘I take it then that you’d prefer they spent £50,000 on a feasibility study instead? Or perhaps went right ahead with a multi-million pound turbine without trying it on a small scale first? Get real.
Nope. What I ‘d prefer is that they stopped b….gg..g about with windmills and sustainability officers and all the flimsy paraphenalia of token greenism entirely and just got on with the jobs they are paid to do….empty the bins, sweep the roads, and cut the grass in the park.
Councils are clearly not staffed or controlled by people bright enough to play with the grown ups…remember how many foolishly invested their taxpayers money in Icelandic banks just before they crashed? It is no business of a local council to be in the electricity generation market, nor to employ people to dabble in it. They can buy their lekkie off the mains like everybody else.
So they can also save £50K a year on employing a guy who (according to you) is incapable even of transcribing numbers correctly in a FOI request. And give the money back to the poor benighted council taxpayers.
Mr Pickles (the Local Government Secretary) has still a long way to go to deflate the vast egos and wasteful habits of local councils. More power to his rather large elbow!

Colin says:
April 28, 2011 at 10:26 am
“Paul Birch, no, installations around the world do not routinely produce 20-30 per cent. to cite just one example, the Gaspe projects of Hydro Quebec have never produced better than 19 per cent despite having one of the most favourable wind regimes on the continent.”
19% is close to 20% (note what I said: “very few fall much outside this range”). We are not talking about just a few percent under, but a factor of ten, down to 2.3%. And for a turbine on a 10m mast in an ordinary location, that’s absurd.
“Your efficiency claims are still rubbish. I explained to you above where the heat losses occur.”
I’m afraid that it’s you talking rubbish. It’s obvious that you do not understand the basic physical concepts, so you keep conflating unrelated factors or constraints with an efficiency limit. It would be quite easy to design a wind turbine with aerodynamic, mechanical and electrical efficiencies in the high nineties. Rolling friction could easily be brought below .001 with roller bearings, even without ultra-low friction devices such as magnetic bearings, long thin aerofoil sections could get L/D>60, gears can be eliminated, velocity changes could be kept small. But as I have pointed out several times already, maximum efficiency is not the design driver of operational wind turbines.

Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 10:59 am
“Nope. What I ‘d prefer is that they stopped b….gg..g about with windmills and sustainability officers and all the flimsy paraphenalia of token greenism entirely and just got on with the jobs they are paid to do….empty the bins, sweep the roads, and cut the grass in the park. ”
You are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Councils are paid – and required by law – to do the green thing. You may not approve of that, but it’s a fact. Unless they can show that they have attempted to meet nationally and supranationally set targets for recycling, energy conservation, renewables, etc., they will be fined (and also lose considerable quantities of grant money), the result of which will be higher council taxes.
“So they can also save £50K a year on employing a guy who (according to you) is incapable even of transcribing numbers correctly in a FOI request.”
Anyone can make typos. You yourself have made quite a few in this thread (as have I).
“Mr Pickles (the Local Government Secretary) has still a long way to go to deflate the vast egos and wasteful habits of local councils. More power to his rather large elbow!”
Westminster politicians always pander to the mob by pretending they will eliminate “waste” in local government, but it’s drivel. Councils do things the way they do because that’s what the law and the government demands. Most of them do about as well as they reasonably could under the impositions of our socialist welfare state. So put the blame where it belongs; with the EU, with the LibLabCon in Parliament, and with the electorate that foolishly keeps voting them back in.

From dave ward on April 27, 2011 at 11:22 am:

That didn’t work as planned at another UK school…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/7870929/Primary-school-forced-to-turn-off-wind-turbine-after-bird-deaths.html

“A primary school has been forced to switch off a £20,000 wind turbine because it keeps killing passing seabirds.”
“The turbine, at Southwell Community Primary School, Portland, was installed 18 months ago thanks to a grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
“It provided six kilowatts of power an hour…”
Apparently it helps to have customers with a suitable grasp of electrical theory when selling £20,000 wind turbines. Six KW per hour?

Here’s the evil bird mincer:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yc-Lk62n49w/TDGNd0BAwPI/AAAAAAAAFCA/Wg-HOprZYmc/s1600/School+Bird+Killer.png

It looks just like this “grid connect” turbine and inverter package with a 6KW nameplate rating, current US pricing converts to £9254. Spec sheet has 230VAC inverter output, 50 or 60HZ. Sample list of commercial customers is UK dominated.
http://www.solarhome.org/provenenergy6kwgridconnectturbine-300vproven6300.aspx
Gee, if they really wanted to be “green” a 6KW diesel generator is going for around US$1200-1500, they could work on running it on the used vegetable oil from the kitchen. And with that at least you know you can get a full 6KW from it, whenever you need it. The wind turbine, probably not.

racookpe1978 says:
April 28, 2011 at 1:15 pm
“The original deadly “smog” (from “Smoke and Fog”) that hung around London for weeks at a time in years past PROVES that regions can – could – and still do have long periods of zero velocity with stagnant air. Winds above 15- 18 knots are needed for power generatin – and worldwide averages are regularly below 20% for so-called “wind generators.” Many days – but certainly not all days – yield power under 1.5% for entire countries.”
Irrelevant. The point is that annual output is seldom much below 20% of nameplate. It could not get as low as 2.3% unless the turbine was out of order for most of the year.

Paul Birch says (April 28, 2011 at 2:09 pm): “However, although the rubbish dump turbine may not have been specifically monitored, its grid tie (and the rebate from the electricity company) will have told them how much electricity it produced over the period.”
Er, then why spend an extra £750 to monitor an off-site turbine when the information is (allegedly) at hand for the site of interest?
“That data must be around somewhere in the system.”
Well, the info was apparently unavailable for the council’s FoI reply. I wonder how much of the council’s expensive time and effort will be required to actually retrieve the numbers?

@paul birch
I juts checked with my local council about their ‘environmental initiatives’.
They are of the opinion that they can meet their statutory obligations by reducing their own energy consumption within the town hall by 10%. A laudable aim..and one that can be achieved for the price of a few Post-It notes saying ‘please switch the lights off whne leaving the office’. And they are one of the better run councils in England with a good track record of well-delivered and mostly well-accepted services.
So I just don’t believe that councils would be fined if they didn’t bugger about playing with windmills on their rooftops. They may choose to do so because they feel it is the right thing to do, because they are interested in it or because they have employed a ‘sustainability officer’ who now has to be given something to do.
But pretending that doing so is forced on you against your better judgement them by the big bad EU or the evil Westminster government is ‘stretching the truth’. There is no statutory obligation on each concil to investigate wind power. Any council that chooses to do so is making a local decision and should be locally accountable for the money they waste on doing so.
It will only take about ten minutes reading for any councillor or council officer to rediscover that all the literature agrees with Latimer’s Helpful Hints for Wind Power for Councillors.
I will restate them in case they have escaped your attention:
1. Wind power does not do what it says on the tin
2. Don’t do it
3. In case of doubt refer to 1.
And Sandwell Council have provided a fantastic public demonstratio of the proff of those laws. By spending in excess of £5,000, they have generated £20 worth of electricty in a year. This is not a good idea. If they had heeded Latimer’s Helpful Hints they would be £5,000 better off.

I’m really hoping on this side of the pond that Dems will once again beat the drum of subsidized green technology as the political ticket to vote for in 2012. Now that the subsidized money trail has been traced to our picked back pockets as we continue to sink into record government spending, I can’t imagine a single out of work democrat voting their own ticket. And maybe ever again.