This academic pushing this PNAS paper thinks wind turbines don’t break, but get obsoleted in about 30 years. Boy is she in for a reality check. That and anyone who thinks they can accurately predict wind power density 30-50 years into the future might not pay attention to details like that. I wonder what makes the great lakes special but not the upper peninsula of Michigan in between? – Anthony
Global warming won’t harm wind energy production, climate models predict
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Source Indiana University
May 2, 2011
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The production of wind energy in the U.S. over the next 30-50 years will be largely unaffected by upward changes in global temperature, say a pair of Indiana University Bloomington scientists who analyzed output from several regional climate models to assess future wind patterns in America’s lower 48 states.
Their report — the first analysis of long-term stability of wind over the U.S. — appears in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
“The greatest consistencies in wind density we found were over the Great Plains, which are already being used to harness wind, and over the Great Lakes, which the U.S. and Canada are looking at right now,” said Provost’s Professor of Atmospheric Science Sara Pryor, the project’s principal investigator. “Areas where the model predicts decreases in wind density are quite limited, and many of the areas where wind density is predicted to decrease are off limits for wind farms anyway.”
Coauthor Rebecca Barthelmie, also a professor of atmospheric science, said the present study begins to address a major dearth of information about the long-term stability of wind as an energy resource. Questions have lingered about whether a warmer atmosphere might lead to decreases in wind density or changes in wind patterns.
“We decided it was time someone did a thorough analysis of long term-patterns in wind density,” Barthelmie said. “There are a lot of myths out there about the stability of wind patterns, and industry and government also want more information before making decisions to expand it.”
Pryor and Barthelmie examined three different regional climate models in terms of wind density changes in a future U.S. experiencing modest but noticeable climate change (warming of about 2 degrees Celsius relative to the end of the last century).
The scientists found the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM) did the best job modeling the current wind climate, but included results from Regional Climate Model 3 (created in Italy but now developed in the U.S.) and the Hadley Centre Model (developed in the U.K.) for the sake of academic robustness and to see whether the different models agreed or disagreed when seeded with the same parameters.
All three state-of-the-art regional climate models were chained to output from one of four atmospheric-ocean general circulation models to derive a complete picture of wind density changes throughout the study area — the lower 48 United States and a portion of northern Mexico.
Comparing model predictions for 2041-2062 to past observations of wind density (1979-2000), most areas were predicted to see little or no change. The areas expected to see continuing high wind density — and therefore greater opportunities for wind energy production — are atop the Great Lakes, eastern New Mexico, southwestern Ohio, southern Texas, and large swaths of several Mexican states, including Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, and Durango.
“There was quite a bit of variability in predicted wind densities, but interestingly, that variability was very similar to the variability we observe in current wind patterns,” Pryor said.
The Great Lakes — Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Erie in particular — consistently showed high wind density no matter what model was used.
Such predictions should prove crucial to American policymakers and energy producers, many of whom have pledged to make wind energy 20 percent of America’s total energy production by 2030. Currently only about 2 percent of American energy comes from wind.
“There have been questions about the stability of wind energy over the long term, ” Barthelmie said. “So we are focusing on providing the best science available to help decision makers.” Pryor added that ‘this is the first assessment of its type, so the results have to be considered preliminary. Climate models are evolving and improving all the time, so we intend to continue this assessment as new models become available.’
Wind farms are nearly carbon neutral, and studies show that a turbine pays for itself after only three months of energy production. A typical turbine lasts about 30 years, Pryor says, not because parts break, but because advances in technology make it desirable to replace turbines with newer versions.
“Wind speed increases with height, so turbines are also getting taller,” Pryor said. “One of our future projects will be to assess the benefit of deploying bigger turbines that extend farther from the ground.”
This is also the week of the annual Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, the largest such energy conference in the world, which has increasingly focused on offshore wind energy production in recent years.
Last month, Pryor was appointed to the National Climate Assessment and Development Committee, convened by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help the U.S. government prepare for and deal with climate change. She also contributed to a special report used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Barthelmie is a widely respected expert on wind energy, particularly in northern Europe, whose wind farms she has studied for years. She was the winner of the European Academy of Wind Energy’s 2009 Academy Science Award. Both Pryor and Barthelmie are faculty in the IU Bloomington Department of Geography, a division of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Research in Environmental Science.
Pryor and Barthelmie’s work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS 1019603), the International Atomic Energy Authority, and the IU Center for Research in Environmental Sciences. The model output they analyzed were provided by the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). NARCCAP is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development.
===============================================================
The full paper: Barthelmie- nas-wind-paper
It seems to me the economics (based on the physics of wind power generation) are ample reason to discontinue pursuit of wind power on any large scale with public finds. So the logical solution is reduction of the tax payer sustenance. Those who desire wind power for their own reasons are free to fund it themselves. I hope the newly elected House of Representatives will “grasp this nettle” as Steve M would say.
Cheers and strong thermals to you glider pilots out there.
When I showed this paper to my college educated (MA in English/education) MSU grad
wife, who spent a lot of time in the Upper Peninsula -her cousin’s married to an “Oopie”
-she said: “What about Ice storms?” Snow?- do they believe there is only wind there?”
Letter I posted to our esteemed Minister for Energy and ‘Climate Change’, Chris Huhne.
Dear Mr Huhne,
Can you kindly explain this?
“Scots windfarms paid cash to stop producing energy.
Windfarms at six sites across Scotland were paid to stop producing electricity. Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged. The turbines, at a range of sites across Scotland, were stopped because the grid network could not absorb all the energy they generated. Details of the payments emerged following research by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF).
The REF said energy companies were paid £900,000 to halt the turbines for several hours between 5 and 6 April. According to the REF research, the payments made cost up to 20 times the value of the electricity that would have been generated if the turbines had kept running. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13253876”
I now see why you think windmills are so beautiful (BBC Any Questions 29/04/11) – it’s the money they can get you from out of the pockets of the poor! Silly me! Why don’t we ALL buy windturbines and get paid for NOT producing electricity at 20x the normal cost of a unit? In fact, better still, why don’t we NOT build wind turbines and not generate electricity and get paid 20x for not producing it?
It’s so daft and corrupt that it begins to look like a bog-standard EU scheme.
The ridiculous statement “Wind farms are nearly carbon neutral, and studies show that a turbine pays for itself after only three months of energy production.” appears in the press release, but not in the paper itself.
What the paper doesn’t say much about is the ability of the models to hindcast the observed wind. There is only some very vague statements, with a ref(28) the I’m having trouble following back to the referenced map.
The authors simply say that they picked the best models, without any real info on how bad that model is.
three months? WTFOMGROTFLMAO
I’ve seen better science done by fry-cooks
My Dad started Wind Engineering – for about 30 years the only journal devoted to the technology of wind power – in 1977. There was a small launch party, attended by, among others, some people from the CEGB, the UK electricity supply authority. They came along to scoff at the idea of wind power as any kind of ‘solution’. And of course they were right, for the wrong reasons. In those days no-one was talking about wind providing 10, or 20, or 30% of national needs. The idea was simply that if you lived on a windy Welsh hillside, you’d be mad not to have a turbine. Likewise, if you had a 1000 unit pig farm, why not have a methane digester to turn all that poo into power, if only to heat and light the pig sheds? But to heat half a city on wind and pig poo? Indeed, a ridiculous idea, and the CEGB people were quite right to scoff at their own straw man. Yet its the very same kind of people who now seriously putting forward these bonkrs ideas. Wind Engineering is, I am pleased to say, still being published, concentrating on the technology, regardless of what the fantasists make of it or not; and in case anyone thinks I am an apologist for green battiness, my company also publishes Energy & Environment which the greenies really hate (and will hate even more now its in ISI).
“”””” Luke of the D says:
May 2, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Sara, Rebecca! Say it ain’t so! You were two of my favorite professors (well Sara was… Rebecca didn’t teach anything when I was there… [trimmed, Robt] Just look at this sentence: “Wind farms are nearly carbon neutral, and studies show that a turbine pays for itself after only three months of energy production.” Really? REALLY? So all that uber-pollution in China is “carbon neutral?” All that glorious 0-5% efficiency will allow your government subsidized wind farm boondagle to pay itself off in 3 months? Really? How is that logical?!? “””””
Well Luke del dia; you have to read what they say to understand what they say.
To whit:- “”””” after only three months of energy production “””””
NOTE:- it does not say :- “”””” after only three months “””””
Kapiche !!
When I started my career in Industry, I often contemplated what I would be working on 5 years hence. In other words, how would my job have changed as to the technologies I was working with (competently or relatively so).
There NEVER was a time when I wasn’t so wide of the mark, in the sense of underestimating how much technology would have advanced or changed.
I can remember letting my eyes get dark adapted, in a darkened Monsanto Chemical R&D Technology Seminar in St Louis Mo (county) at their corporate R&D labs, and gaze into an binocular assembly microscope, and observe that the tiny piece of semi-conductor material under the probe, was indeed glowing a dull red color; and not from being hot. That was in 19 66; and today, modern red and especially yellow LED products have to conform to international standards of “brightness” limitations similar to laser products to prevent eye damage from too high a light intensity.
What did your cell phone look like in 1966; or your PC for that matter. How was trading on e-Bay done in those days ?
Come to think of it, what were commercial wind farm power stations like 30 years ago ?
“”””” Dennis Cox says:
May 3, 2011 at 7:41 am
“…a turbine pays for itself after only three months of energy production. ”
Having been involved in the installation of a 10KW wind turbine at a friend’s place in southern California I have a problem with that number.
We got a great deal on the unit. Because we bought it unused from a dealer who’d gone out of business a couple of years before. Except for the crane, and crew of riggers. We did the complete installation ourselves. And we put it on top of an 80’ monopole tower. With tax incentives, and California’s immerging renewable buy-down program, the net cost was still somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000.
10 KW is a hell of a lot more power than 1 house needs. But even if that unit were powering enough houses to run it at full capacity, the minimum buy-back time is still something like five years. “””””
What are you smokin man ? 10kW is about the size of a decent hi-fi boom box these days.
Most new houses (USA) are supplied with two phases giving 230-240 Volts at 200 Amps, at the main breaker box. Thats 46-48 kW, and depending on what you are smoking, you will likely use all of it on your indoor garden.
My son uses maybe 12 Watts, of blue and red LED power to goose his indoor garden. But his garden is entirely carnivorous, so he has to keep it inside an enclosed humid environment. With the LED power, those darn things are taking over the whole house. Pretty soon it won’t be safe to be inside; well inside and asleep anyway.
Aesthetics anyone?
I can’t stand looking at these fields of spinning hypno-ugliness. I get a headache every time I drive by them. There a has never been a visual blight imposed so quickly on the earth since the development of power lines. And power lines don’t move.
How can anyone justify this massive act of destruction of panoramic views?
I have no doubt that these spin-fields are mass psychological stressors. I guess if you have your TV on 24 hours a day you won’t notice.
So urban blight is bad, but rural blight is fine?
Richard S Courtney says: May 3, 2011 at 1:45 am
… Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird swatters that produce no useful electricity at any time: they merely displace power stations onto standby mode (when the power stations continue to consume their fuel and to produce their emissions) during the periods when the wind is strong enough but not too strong for the wind turbines to generate electricity.”
But you could not resist jumping in, so at May 2, 2011 at 6:27 pm
You assert and ask me:
“What do you not understand about conservation of resources. A power station runing without producing power (spinning reserve, warm start) consumes very little energy to when fully loaded. This surely is obvious? Otherwise where does the excess fuel energy go?”
Your question displays as great an ignorance of the subject as is demonstrated by Kum Dollinson .
I answer;
It goes OUT OF THE COOLING TOWERS along with most of the energy from the fuel whether or not the power station is generating electricity.
The internet is a wonderful thing:
From GE
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/aero_turbines/en/downloads/lms100_brochure.pdf
The LMS100 is the Right Solution:
Outstanding full- and part-power efficiency
Low hot-day lapse rate
High availability – aero modular maintenance
Low maintenance cost
Designed for cycling applications
No cost penalty for starts and stops
Load-following capability
10 Minutes to full power
Improves average efficiency in cycling
Potential for spinning reserve credits
Reduced start-up emissions
Synchronous condenser capability
At reduced output:
39% efficiency at 50% load compared to 50% at 100% load
For a CCGT (more efficiency) not intended for anything other than base load the efficiency drops by 40% (of 60%) when running at 40% base load.
and from the House Of Lords.
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/195/19507.htm
101. The first cost imposed by intermittency is that more plant has to be held in reserve to cope with short-term fluctuations in output. At present, National Grid, which operates the electricity system,[34] keeps a number of power stations running at less than their full capacity, providing about 1 GW of spinning reserve—that is capacity which can automatically respond to any shortfall in generation within seconds (Q 293).[35] The company also contracts with other stations to start generation quickly and has arrangements with industrial consumers to reduce their demand at short notice, in order to restore the level of spinning reserves as soon as possible after they are used. The company holds about 2.5 GW of this standing reserve (Q 293); 70% of this comes from generation, and 30% from industrial consumers (p 144).
102. As the amount of wind generation rises, the potential short-term change in wind output will also increase, and National Grid will have to hold more reserve to cope with this increase. The company told us that if renewables provided 40% of electricity generation—the share the company believes would be needed to meet the EU’s 2020 energy target—its total short-term reserve requirements would jump to between 7 and 10 GW. Most of this would be standing rather than spinning reserves. This would add £500 million to £1 billion to the annual cost of these reserves—known as balancing costs—which are now around £300 million a year (Q 293). This is equivalent to around 0.3 to 0.7 pence per kWh of renewable output.
103. Estimates of balancing costs vary widely. The government has commissioned research from the consultancy SKM,[36] which estimated that if renewables provided 34% of electricity by 2020, with 27.1% from wind power, the extra cost of short-term balancing would be about 1.4 p/kWh of wind output[37] (Q 481). This equates to a total cost of £1.4 billion, well above that assumed by National Grid. Several pieces of evidence cited a 2006 report by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC),[38] which had estimated the balancing costs with up to 20% of intermittent renewable output in Great Britain at 0.2-0.3 pence per kWh. Although the share of renewables in the SKM study was less than double that of UKERC, the balancing costs per unit were more than five times higher. In part, this may reflect higher fuel costs since the studies surveyed by UKERC were performed; but it will also reflect the greater challenges of dealing with larger shares of intermittent renewable generation.
So the costs of up to 20% wind is between £0.002 and £0.014 per kWh
The UK cost per kWh is approx £0.11
bill:
Your comments at May 3, 2011 at 1:15 pm are not “battiness”: they are eminently sensible.
Yes, windpower does have useful niche markets: e.g. pumping water at remote locations, providing electricity to the batteries on small boats, etc..
The problem is that snake-oil-salesmen supported by idiots are usurping electricity grids with windpower and – as I have repeatedly explained, see above at May 3, 2011 at 1:45 am – that is plain daft.
Richard
w says: May 3, 2011 at 3:49 pm
it was me walt man
Models all the way down indeed. I was recently at the most southernly point of the USA, if the signs were true, South Point, Hawaii, Hawaii, there are 3 rows of windmills with rust oozing down their peeling white paint, all very dead, most with blades missing. About a mile SW there are arround a dozen newer models almost all turning in what was a stiff breeze at the time. Poster children for the question who pays to remove these subsidised eyesores? I am promoting the use of the human hampster wheel for experts such as the above, to repay their debt to society, at fractional kW/h outputs they will take several reincarnations to pay back their current debts. But in the interests of social justice I feel even this insane concept should be used. Retributive justice for promoting a malicious fraud/or for being insanely stupid.
I would venture a guess that wind patterns in the lower 48 and more impacted by temperatures in the lower 48 which according to NCDC have been dropping like a rock since 1989.
Make that 1998, not 1989.
w:
At May 3, 2011 at 3:49 pm you conclude from calculations you conducted on data you found on the internet:
“So the costs of up to 20% wind is between £0.002 and £0.014 per kWh
The UK cost per kWh is approx £0.11.”
The UK government’s OFGEN (the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) begs to differ.
They developed and used a financial model to estimate the trajectory of unit costs (progress curve) in the period from 2005 to 2020 for wind power, wave power, tidal lagoons, and tidal streams. Their estimates for each technology were in terms of the premium required (in £/MWh) over the cost of new CCGT power to enable each technology to earn required return on capital.
According to these OFGEN estimates the required premiums for windpower (i.e. costs additional to the cost of gas-fired CCGT power station electricity) are:
wind power 41 £/MWh (i.e. £0.o41 £/kWh)
off-shore wind power 62 £/MWh (i.e. £0.o62 £/kWh)
ref.
Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OFGEN), ‘Assessment of the Benefits from
Large-Scale Deployment of Certain Renewable Technologies’, Cambridge Economic
Policy Associates, April 2005.
Please note that OFGEN is a UK government agency and, therefore, is likely to provide a low estimate of the cost of windpower. Indeed, their “trajectory” factored in a high estimate for the rate of increase to the cost of gas over the next 20 years and, thus, provided low estimates of the premiums needed for windpower.
You can read an explanation of the problems of windpower for electricity generation in a Prestigious Lecture I had the honour to provide a few years ago which can be read at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Richard
PS You use a good name by the way.
Hmmm.
Did you look at the gas turbine data?
100MW elect requires 185MW heat
50MW elect requires 106MW heat
Same 100MW turbine starts in 10 mins to give full output.
Even the more efficient CCGT is at full power after 3 hours.
Not bad in my books!
Hmmmm!!!! 1/10 your figures from the same gov source:
http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/Sustainability/Environment/Policy/Documents1/Renewable%20Energy%20Strategy%20response.pdf
The scale of the challenge today
1.39. According to NGET, an increase in intermittent forms of generation such as wind will increase its balancing costs through reserve costs, frequency response, and constraints costs.2 NGET did not specifically measure the contribution made by wind to its System Operator costs in 2007-08, but it estimated that the reserve costs associated with the 2.5GW of installed wind capacity were around £17m. It further estimated that the additional costs of the 500MW of extra wind capacity that are expected to be operational in 2008-09 will increase its costs by a further £10m. The majority of this increase (£8m) would be spent on ensuring sufficient reserve generation, which is required due to the high error factor associated with wind forecasting, £2m of the increase would result from fast reserve and frequency response costs, and around £70k would be spent on constraint costs3.
1.40. It is likely that the annual cost of reserve will increase significantly as the proportion of wind generation increases. Predictions for future costs range from £4-£7.50 for each additional MWh of wind placed on the system4. A cost of £7.50/MWh applied to the projected level of wind capacity of 14 GW by 2014-15 would cost an additional £275m in balancing costs in that year (assuming a 30% load factor). By way of comparison, balancing costs for the whole system in 2008/09 are forecast to be around £530m. The challenge therefore, is to ensure appropriate incentives are in place to ensure these costs are managed and the available reserve capacity is used in the most efficient way. This is manageable under current arrangements.
Perhaps you would care to share the URL of your older paper?
walt man:
I am assuming that your post at May 4, 2011 at 3:34 pm is addressed to me.
If that is assumption is an error, then I apologise.
Yes, I quoted OFGEN because it has a strongly pro-renewables bias and, therefore, OFGEN cannot be claimed to be other than conservative in its estimates of the cost of windpower for electricity generation. I could have cited other analyses which indicate that the cost of windpower for electricity generation is much higher.
Indeed, OFGEN’s assessment assumes that during the 15 year future the cost of windpower would reduce a lot while the cost of CCGT power would increase a lot, but it still came to the conclusion that windpower would be between 40% ad 60% more than CCGT power over the period.
Those are the facts, and your sales pitch cannot obscure them.
Also, I cannot cite any individual paper of mine without a reference to which one you want.
Richard
So windmills are a great deal and pay for themselves in 3 months. So why are there 14,000 electric-generating windmills that have been abandonded just in California alone?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
Oh yeah, in Scotland the windmill farms get paid to NOT produce power. Sems it’s cheaper that way.
Richard S Courtney says: May 5, 2011 at 4:13 am
Yes, I quoted OFGEN because it has a strongly pro-renewables bias and, therefore, OFGEN cannot be claimed to be other than conservative in its estimates of the cost of windpower for electricity generation. I could have cited other analyses which indicate that the cost of windpower for electricity generation is much higher.
…
Those are the facts, and your sales pitch cannot obscure them.
Also, I cannot cite any individual paper of mine without a reference to which one you want.
Your quote of ofgen from 2005 does not agree with my referenced ofgeM from 2008
I was hoping you could give me a reference to check for your ofgeN document
my reference gives £0.007/kWh
My earlier ref to house of lords gives £0.004/kWh cost of balancing. (same ball-park)
You state a figure of 10 times that!!!
I gave references you did not – who is correct?
from:
http://blog.silverford.com/2011/02/balloo-enercon-wind-turbine-bangor-northern-ireland-stats-figures-and-price/
£889,650 turbine cost
£434,583 planning and consultancy
maintenance cost €0.0055 per kilowatt hour – 12 year guarantee
As reported to Council in December 2009 a pay-back period of approximately 7-8 years has been calculated. This is based on a full capital cost of £890,000 and a basic provision of £30,000 to cover routine expenditure
Lots more info in link
Again these figures from a FOI request seem to disprove your assertions.
walt man:
Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird swatters that produce no useful electricity but disrupt an electricity grid.
Those are the facts.
Obfuscate as much as you want. But everybody who assesses the matter determines those are the facts.
If your cost figures were anything like the truth then there would be no subsidies for windpower, but no windfarm could survive in the market without subsidies.
You are fooling nobody, so post whatever else you want: I will ignore it.
Richard
walt man:
As an addendum for the information of onlookers, I point out a simple demonstration of your attempts to mislead that anybody can check in seconds.
Your most recent post (at May 5, 2011 at 4:24 pm ) that has induced my refusal to address any additional posts from you said to me:
“I was hoping you could give me a reference to check for your ofgeN document ”
My post that cited the OFGEN document is at May 4, 2011 at 5:14 am and includes this:
“ref.
Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OFGEN), ‘Assessment of the Benefits from
Large-Scale Deployment of Certain Renewable Technologies’, Cambridge Economic
Policy Associates, April 2005.”
Richard
Richard S Courtney says: May 6, 2011 at 1:37 am
Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird swatters that produce no useful electricity but disrupt an electricity grid.
Those are the facts
I have given you referenced documents to show this is not the case. You have provided words with no references.
(by the way the RSPB supports wind farms when correctly located out of flight paths)
My post that cited the OFGEN document is at May 4, 2011 at 5:14 am and includes this:
I think this is ofgem not ofgen
I too supplied a more recent ofgem document, a House of Lords report and a FOId response all showing that figures for the cost of windpower is less than 1% of cost.
I am sorry that you feel unwilling to back up your claims – I would like the opportunity to learn.
Cheers
Walt