Bishop Hill points to an essay in the Spectator Matt Ridley: The Beginning Of The End Of Wind which is a summary of the arguments against wind power. He (and I) were not aware of this point:
Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double.
I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
…
So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.
Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.
Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?
There is nothing new about marine wind power being more expensive. For one thing, construction is more expensive since the turbines and power lines must handle salt-related corrosion problems.
Using California as an example, the areas with sustained class 5 wind speed (about 6-8 m/s depending on height AGL) are limited. Only off shore does enough area exist to produce wind power in quantities suffient to put a dent in energy needs. Each turbine needs 80 acres, and because wind has a 30% capacity factor (being generous) you have to build 3x the number of turbines to produce the baseplate power and then store it.
To be serious about replacing fossil fuel or nuclear power, for a small nation or large state, tens to hundreds of thousands of turbines must be constructed, covering thousands of square miles of land or ocean. People cannot live among or near the turbines. The operation and maintenance costs quickly make the approach impractical (salaries and benefits alone explode a budget). Gear boxes fail, blades spinning too fast fly apart, turbines catch fire. How much fossil fuel is used to make one turbine?
“Levelized” costs analyses are manipulated for poltical purposes easily up to one order of magnitude. When you see them, avoid swallowing hook, line, and sinker.
“As a believer in AGW and somewhat who believes we must take the right action, I observe the following. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require a great sum of money down the line. wasting money today on solutions that are not ready for prime time is worse than pouring C02 into the air.”
Then you’ve missed the point of the new “Green-Collar” industry altogether.
1) Start with a dump-truck full of money.
2) Use it to prop up as many Solyndras as you can find.
3) Reap the political benefits of making rich new friends and a nifty new factory as the backdrop for your next campaign speech
4) Win re-election
5) Repeat as necessary, or until term limits kick in.
Viable solutions? Those actually detrimental to the process. Once the problem is solved, the crisis is over, and I’ve lost my reason to secure additional dump-trucks of money.
ColinW : March 5, 2012 at 4:59 am
said: “….Are there any reliable sources to back this up other than “I have it on good authority from a marine engineer…?….”
Common sense and logical thinking should give you a clue that he might be on the right track.
amicus curiae says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am
It is disappointing that in a science blog no citations are provided with figures like that. Here is something of vital importance with respect to the figures you provided, which specific figures may have come from a quote in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, in Australia:
That makes me wonder why it is that the Sidney Morning Herald in it original article so seriously misquoted those figures and exaggerated them by a factor of ten. How can such a gross exaggeration happen?
I have not been able to find the report at the source, the Australian Productivity Commission.
Any alternate source of power generation will be “discovered” to have social and environmental impacts that far outweigh the benefits they provide and those problem will be promoted loudly so that they become engrained in the social consciousness. The only alternate sources that are to be promoted are one that don’t work, or are economically disastrous. The goal, after all is the destruction of capitalism. Economies need to be destroyed, personal liberties must be abridged, and property confiscated to serve the greater good of everyone. This is the only way to bring about the great Socialist Utopia.
Sandy in Derby said
‘There are less (sometimes no) waves when there is no wind, so that could be a double whammy. ‘
Come on Sandy, if you are in Derby you are as far from the sea as it is possible to get in the UK and are therefore disqualified from this debate 🙂
Seriously, the water solution requires us to make use of tides-highly predicatable-waves, ( less so) and also the thermal gradient of water. A thirty foot tall device floating submerged in the water could pick up all those sources of energy but of course still needs to be situated close to transmission lines or, bearing in mind how many people live next to the sea, could power the homes of those of us fortunate enough to do so without new transmission lines defacing the countryside.
The devices would need to be very robust but unfortunately in order to meet our EU obligations on carbon there is very little research into using the power of the ocean and instead we are lumbered with the relatively mature technology of inefficient wind turbines.
tonyb
cwj said to me;
‘How do you know that? It’s my guess that the engineers that prepared the project cost estimates were well aware of that basic cost and included it.’
I know that because I wrote an article about it. Also see the reply above about the German project where they forgot to include the power line costs.
Im not saying that the engineers necessarily forgot it but by the time it gets to the political level all sorts of inconvenient costs disappear.
tonyb
amicus curiae. There are times where the costs on wind are far larger that you say. Here in Ontario, Canada a lot of wind power has been installed. The grid is not stable, unless wind power is less that 15%. So, when the wind blows, you need to produce nearly 6 times as much power from stable sourses, as the wind is generating, just to keep the grid stable. If we dont need that much power, then Ontario has to PAY other places to take the excess power off our hands. Or it has to pay the wind producers NOT to produce power. I am sure this must add to costs.
anticlimactic @9:01: “- Ethanol has been proved to require 40% more energy to produce than it creates [a green group said they had disproved this but as is often the case I suspect ‘disproved’ should read as ‘ignored’!], and the watts per square metre using corn is abysmal.”
If ethanol uses more energy to produce than it creates, please explain why the wholesale cost of unblended ethanol is less than the wholesale price of unblended gasoline. The wholesale price includes the cost of all resources that go into the product with a profit.
Bruce Hall :March 5, 2012 at 9:08 am
said: “Bob Dylan may have been wrong [The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind….]…”
Obviously in error here.
Bob Dylan is never wrong 😉
Dylan : And the masters, make the rules, for the wise men, and the fools….
“so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?” Demonization of carbon (repulsive, archaic and world destroying) and vanity (fashionable, self-serving, and self-righteous). Nothing to do with technology or economy – obviously
This sort of reminds me of the remake of the .’War of the Worlds’ where at the end the Tripods were all broken and leaning up against buildings or fallen over in fields.. Wont be long now.
Bill Garland says:
March 5, 2012 at 6:25 am
The units should not be MWh, they should be MW of name-plate generating capacity. The cost figure should be $ per MW of generating capacity because they relate to initial capital investment.
The rate of $0.10 kWh that you pay on your electricity bill is what you pay for your energy consumption. That rate is calculated to include a rate of capital recovery for the initial capital investment plus overhead (mainly profit margin, you pay extra, over and above all of that, for transmission and distribution to your home and for billing).
The average price paid in Alberta to producers of electric energy where it is fed into the grid is about $23MWh, and that is a conglomerate price for energy from all sources of energy generation that includes the costs of initial capital investment plus the cost of production and maintenance of generating plants.
kbray in california @ur momisugly 9:17 “Nuclear or water power is the only current practical source of a replacement to fossil fueled energy that will not cripple our civilization. ”
Although nuclear should be part of the mix, it is not the perfect power source, every source has drawbacks and advantages. Nuclear cannot be modulated to match loads, nuclear covers base load only. When a plant goes off line, it is a large impact on the system, a nuclear plant is a large fraction of the generation capacity. When it goes off line for maintenance, it is off line for extended times, and a nuclear plant in Nebraska was kept off-line this past year due to the potential for flooding. When off-line that capacity has to be made up from other sources.
Water can serve as base. It can also be modulated unless you are trying to keep the reservoir from overflowing, then you have to run the generators at capacity of lose the potential energy of the water that bypasses the generator. However, try to get a new reservoir approved.
re post by: climatereason says: March 5, 2012 at 5:30 am
Nuclear would make vastly more sense than wave/tidal.
“If ethanol uses more energy to produce than it creates, please explain why the wholesale cost of unblended ethanol is less than the wholesale price of unblended gasoline. The wholesale price includes the cost of all resources that go into the product with a profit.”
ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy density of gasoline. So even if they cost the same per gallon, ethanol would still be more expensive.
Beyond that, subsidies baby, subsidies.
I think the word you were looking for is, right actions, not fashionable actions. If a consensus among some climate scientists, who aren’t engineers, develops around an engineering solution, it’s virtually guaranteed to be spectacularly wrong.
Och, it doesn’t matter too that they’re unstable; it’s their inefficiency that’s the greatest and most obvious problem (and I suppose cost comes into that equation). Wind and wave power systems don’t deliver when they’re most needed: in the midst of a long calm very cold spell for example. Clear winter skies usually mean hard frost and no wind, meaning a greater demand for power for heating . . . .just when the turbines are standing stock still and the waves have died away.
And the idea of installing WIND turbines out at sea, ABOVE flowing water – a much more powerful and reliable source of force – looks a wee bit absurd to me. It’s an industrial insult. A commercial joke.
I despair at the antics of the wind and wave power brigade in the uk, when our coastal waters are constantly on the move. The tidal currents flow to a pattern; they are utterly reliable – so long as the moon continues to do its work – and they are readily accessible. Give me a decent sized RIB and in one hour I could take a dozen of our politicians and industrialists to numerous locations off the coast of Galloway which would supply the solution to Scotland’s electrical energy needs for a very long time to come. And I don’t mean by using an underwater version of the turbines that some have in mind for the job: the approach should be large scale marine equivalents of our loch and river HEP systems; massive operations that are stable and capture and convert vast amounts of tidal power. All they have to do is space them out around the coast to ensure that differing, but short, slack water periods are adequately covered.
Too obvious? I’m beginning to think so.
Not about energy supply, but more about profit from subsidies? I’m inclined to believe that too.
As someone who’s spent much of his life on the sea around Galloway I’ve been waiting for over 40 years for real HEP stations to be built on the tidal rivers that flow within much of the local coastal waters. I don’t expect to live long enough to see them now. So long as they go on building wind turbines on land or at sea in particular, that in itself is prima facie evidence in my view that it isn’t really about solving the energy problem. . . .
rationaldb8
I agree about nuclear but no nation is likely to use it as their primary source of power at present, just as a small part of the overall mix, if they use it at all
tonyb.
Tidal power is not much better than wind. There is no proven technology. The tides are standardized in a rule of twelfths for simplicity. The flow rates are described as: 1-2-3-3-2-1 where the middle two hours of the 6 hour tide contain half the flow, hence half the power (+/-) of the tide. This means that the useful tide would be in 4 x 2hour segments each day and the rest of the time would be wasted. Unfortunately the times are later by about 40 mins per day so there is no standard time for power generation. They then vary from Spring (fast) to Neap (slow) over a fortnight so no standard power output there either. Most places have very little tide. i.e. The Mediterranean. Notable exceptions are the Bay of Fundy, Bristol Channel etc. So I would say that tidal power is not going to be much better than wind. Best to just dam the rivers and have done with it. In Brittany the Rance is dammed for hydro electric and the Vilaine for fresh water. Well known and proven technology. So a few swamp toads die out. Life is a bitch. Get over it.
(Add Oxford commas and parenthesis to your taste)
cwj
March 5, 2012 at 9:58 am
anticlimactic @9:01: “- Ethanol has been proved to require 40% more energy to produce than it creates [a green group said they had disproved this but as is often the case I suspect ‘disproved’ should read as ‘ignored’!], and the watts per square metre using corn is abysmal.”
If ethanol uses more energy to produce than it creates, please explain why the wholesale cost of unblended ethanol is less than the wholesale price of unblended gasoline. The wholesale price includes the cost of all resources that go into the product with a profit.
###
What planet do you come from. Here on earth governments manipulate the cost of thing via taxes and subsidies.
I expect that salvaging these turbines will be a very lucrative business soon.
Maybe connect them to natural gas turbines, sell them to small municipalities.
cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 9:58 am
The explanation (a fact, not a guess), is that the price of ethanol is so much lower because it is heavily subsidized.
re post by: Latitude says: March 5, 2012 at 8:18 am
Now why does the idea of icebergs in a wind power turbine field bring to mind the very graphic image of a super sized slow motion pin-ball machine?
tonyb
I think we’re both singing off the same hymn sheet. Problem is that investment in sea generated energy has been virtually nil. I think to meet the treaty requirement in the time available is impossible. The sensible option is to abrogate any treaty about reducing CO2 emissions.
BTW I’m not a native of Derby, home is Comrie Perthshire, almost as far from the sea as possible in Scotland 🙂