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?
cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:17 am
“Nuclear cannot be modulated to match loads, nuclear covers base load only.”
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Although I did not spell it out, I include new generation thorium salt reactors and many smaller facilities. My understanding is that nuclear power plants generate heat to boil water that spins steam turbines that generate electricity. To match loads, all one needs to do is switch a valve to turn the turbine on or off. Keep the plant online and making steam… turning a valve will generate power just as quickly as a hydro dam water valve…. what’s the problem?
The old generation nuclear breeder plants are white elephants. Best bet is to perfect thorium.
cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 9:58 am
Re: low ethanol price
More on ethanol subsidies:
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/history-ethanol-subsidy-legislation-1978-2005
A lot more information on ethanol subsidies is available on the Internet, but I think that the table provided at that link gives you the picture.
It is entirely possible that politicians get their solar and wind power information from watching the Teletubbies on the BBC as children. Subliminal indoctrination! What a devilish conspiracy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJTOtrGKEls&feature=related
Steven Mosher says:
March 5, 2012 at 9:00 am
As a believer in AGW and somewhat who believes we must take the right action…
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Please share your view of what “right actions” are and where the ‘C’ in CAGW is, and what disasters you expect to occur that simply responding to them as they manifest, (which I doubt will happen) would not be far less expensive then proposed “right actions”.
PS: If current nuclear power plants cannot quickly adjust to demand loads, then the original design was lousy. A plant should have 20 or 30 separate turbines to start and stop with valves in the design to adjust to the load. If they only have one big turbine, then they were idiots.
We need to build thorium reactors by the thousands everywhere.
Walter H. Schneider @10:53, “A lot more information on ethanol subsidies is available on the Internet, but I think that the table provided at that link gives you the picture.”
Your reference is correct that in 2005 the subsidy became a blender’s tax credit. Which means that the distributor got the subsidy the producer did not. The producer had to make a profit based on the price that the distributor paid, which is the wholesale price, without the benefit of any subsidy to the producer. Yet the wholesale price of ethanol has remained less than the wholesale price of unleaded gasoline and producers are producing ethanol.
Your source does not include that the blender’s tax credit was ended last December, yet ethanol producers are still producing ethanol.
kbray in california says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:57 am
I wonder what makes you say that. A thermal, coal-fire power plant may take as much as a couple of days between being fired up and having its generating capacity bought up to snuff and fed into the grid. That lag time is generally a few hours for gas-fired power plants. Nuclear-fired thermal power plants are in the same range.
The problem with bringing a new source of generation on-line is that not only must it adjust to the power demanded of it but it must also be in sync and exactly in phase.
The more turbines are feeding into the grid, the more complex the regulating issues become. Wind-powered turbines complicate that problem to an enormous extent. The more wind turbines are connected to a grid, the more difficult it becomes to prevent cascading outages. That is on account of the stochastic nature of their generating capacity jeopardizing system stability.
The European electrical system operators have very great and growing concerns about that and issue warning after warning that the grid in being placed at ever increasing risk of large-scale, cascading outages, due to connecting ever-increasing numbers of wind-farms to the grid. They state that as of now there is no foreseeable solution to the problem. Reaction times for regulating and stabilizing the grid due to the stochastic nature of wind-generation.must be within a fraction of a second, while the reality of power regulation of generating-capacity, -voltage, -frequency and -phase from conventional sources can not ever hope to achieve that.
The problems posed by that may be alleviated somewhat if all of the transmission lines in the grid were to be converted to high-voltage DC-transmission, but that would in essence require the re-engineering and re-construction of the whole transmission grid, with the construction of DC-AC and AC-DC converters being required wherever voltage needs to be stepped down or up.
One issue that escalates the problem is that the education of engineering personnel required to address all of that seriously lags the demand.
climatereason says:
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.
Currently, France produces over 75% of its electricity with nuclear power.
The key is to have a diverse selection of plants scattered throughout the grid, making downtime something which can be planned for.
Source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html
It’s amateur hour.
“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. ”
I thought the whole point was the environment? Sounds enormous.
On corrosion, I once read about the massive undertaking that it it is to protect the Statue of Liberty from corrosion. That’s one object, wind turbines are thousands of objects ….
I hadn’t realised that you can’t live on a windfarm. Just getting people to and from work every day must cost a fortune. My father used to work on North sea gas platforms – he went by helicopter. But that was I think for 3 weeks.
Actually the more I think about it, the more you realise gas/oil are extremely good sources of power, which actually produce small amounts of environmental damage compared to the amount of energy they provide.
kbray in california @ur momisugly 10:57: “PS: If current nuclear power plants cannot quickly adjust to demand loads, then the original design was lousy. A plant should have 20 or 30 separate turbines to start and stop with valves in the design to adjust to the load. If they only have one big turbine, then they were idiots.”.
My experience is with coal fired plants, where one boiler fires one turbine. So apparently you consider the designers of coal-fired plants as idiots. But the coal feed to a coal fired plant cannot be cut in a manner to modulate the production of steam, it takes a while for the production of heat from the burner to decrease and for the production of steam from that heat to also decrease. There are some coal fired plants that can modulate production of electricity, but the operators tell me that they are more efficient if run at a constant rate, so the preference is to run those at constant rate and use gas to accommodate the variations in demand.
As applies to nuclear I would be surprised if the nuclear reaction could be modulated to the extent of the reaction stopping or slowing and production of heat dissipating instantly, or with enough immediacy to modulate the production of electricity, so the design problem in modulating production isn’t the number of turbines, it’s the production of heat.
That’s my take on the periphery of the industry, (as a structural, civil, and water engineer) but I’ll yield to someone with direct experience in the design and operation of the plants.
“Currently, France produces over 75% of its electricity with nuclear power.
The key is to have a diverse selection of plants scattered throughout the grid, making downtime something which can be planned for.
Source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html”
And what love about it is that we sell a lot of it to Britain, so all those times the windmills are offline, British homes are running on nuclear lol. And the more windfarms therre are, the more nuke Britain will need 🙂
J Pickens
Sorry, implicit in my comment was that nations wouldn’t use Nuclear in their current planning scenarios as their prime source of energy. I am aware of the French effort but i think the high water mark has passed judging by Germany’s response to the Japan disaster.
Which leaves me wondering how we (in Britain) will manage for energy in the future as we seem to be building few grown up power stations but are littering our countryside with silly wind mills whilst the govt pays a fortune to lavishly subsidise solar power in a country that doesn’t get much sun. Madness…
tonyb
re post by: cwj says: March 5, 2012 at 10:17 am
Certainly no source is perfect, and all do have drawbacks. I have to note, however, that your comments are a bit misleading regarding nuclear power plants. I’ll try to address some of the issues.
Plant down time – first, I suspect that in most nations a single nuclear reactor isn’t a large fraction of the generating capacity, even tho the output of that plant is a huge amount of electricity. In the USA there are just over 100 commercial power reactors, which produce about 20% of the nation’s electricity. Take one of those offline and it’s a quite small fraction of the nation’s electrical supply. Even in France, where those numbers are flipped a bit, they’ve got 59 reactors producing roughly 80% of the nation’s electricity – so each plant provides roughly 1.35% of the nation’s power – arguably not anything close to a ‘large fraction’ of the generation capacity. For the sake of efficiency, they do tend to run their plants at full capacity (rather than load following) and therefore wind up exporting roughly 18% of their total electrical production. All of this, and France has close to the cheapest electricity in the EU.
In the USA and I believe France also (possibly throughout the EU, but I don’t know for certain), nuclear power has a very high reliability factor. Including all outages for any cause, maintenance, refueling, etc., they are fully available over 90% of the time. Consider also that this very high reliability factor is for plants that are typically more than 20 years old, and yet they’ve maintained that high reliability factor for decades (actually over time their reliability factor has gone up, rather than down, as improvements in planning and maintenance practices have evolved).
Plants going offline aren’t as big a problem as implied. Yes, each is a large source of power, but nations always require, for any power source, that there is a certain backup capacity available to be brought online as needed. For nuclear power the biggest downtime by far is for refueling – and planning is such these days that a typical refueling outage lasts significantly less than 30 days, once every 18 months or so. These are scheduled during times of the year that have the lowest energy demand. A huge amount of maintenance is done at the same time, taking advantage of the downtime. Key parts (e.g., any that have to be worked on while the plant isn’t running) are replaced before they are likely to fail, regardless of how well they are functioning or how good they look or test, all based on the known durability of that sort of part from industry wide experience and tests.
So when a nuclear power plant goes offline, if other power plants aren’t able to fill in with sufficient replacement power, then as needed existing backup power plant(s) are brought online to make up any shortfall. In other words, there are already sources of replacement power available that are factored into the various requirements and costs.
In comparison, because of the intermittent nature of wind, it is estimated that wind needs about 90% backup power sources available, where other conventional power sources (including nuclear) require 25% or less. Building and maintaining all the backup plants required for wind is a huge inefficiency and cost – not to mention since those are conventional power sources, it sure cuts into how much wind even manages to reduce CO2 emissions. Modeling by the UK National Grid Corporation showed that “building 25 GWe of wind capacity, equivalent to almost half of UK peak demand, will only reduce the need for conventional fossil and nuclear plant capacity by 6.7%. Also, some 30 GWe of spare capacity will need to be on immediate call continuously to provide a normal margin of reserve and to back up the wind plant’s inability to produce power on demand – about two thirds of it being for the latter….Because wind turbine output is so variable, for planning purposes its potential output is discounted to the level of power that can be relied upon for 90% of the time. In Australia that figure comes to 7% of installed wind capacity, in Germany it is 8%, which is all that can be included as securely available (ie 90% of the time).* On the 90% availability basis, other technologies can be counted on for much higher reliability, and hence the investment cost per kilowatt reliably available is much less. * Figures from NEMMCO and E.ON respectively. ” (quoted from: http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf10.html).
Next, the issue of nuclear and load following. Actually, existing power plants can and some have been adapted to allow some load following, although it isn’t the most efficient use of the core. Generation III plants (those now being built) were designed from the beginning to allow more load following if desired. Nuclear is still best for base load, but the point is that they can load follow to some extent and that ability is significantly greater for the current generation designs being built (and some of those already operating for years in other nations). From the same article linked above: “Where it is necessary to vary the output according to daily and weekly load cycles, for instance in France, where there is a very high reliance on nuclear power, they can be adapted to load-follow. For BWRs this is reasonably easy without burning the core unevenly, but for a PWR to run at less than full power for much of the time depends on where it is in the 18 to 24-month refueling cycle, and whether it is designed with special control rods which diminish power levels throughout the core without shutting it down. So while the ability on any individual PWR reactor to run on a sustained basis at low power decreases markedly as it progresses through the refueling cycle, there is considerable scope for running a fleet of reactors in load-following mode. Generation III plants have more scope for load-following, “
Also, in most nations hydro isn’t well suited for or used for base load. It’s by far more useful in dealing with peak loads. Again from the link already cited: “Hydro-electric power, using the potential energy of rivers, is by far the best-established means of electricity generation from renewable sources. It now supplies 16% of world electricity (99% in Norway, 58% in Canada, 55% in Switzerland, 45% in Sweden, 7% in USA, 6% in Australia). Apart from those four countries with an abundance of it, hydro capacity is normally applied to peak-load demand, because it is so readily stopped and started. This also means that it is an ideal complement to wind power in a grid system, and is used thus most effectively by Denmark (see case study below). World hydro capacity is 867 GWe, and in 2006 it supplied 3121 GWh (41% capacity factor), underlining its generally peak use.
Hydro is not a major option for the future in the developed countries because most major sites in these countries having potential for harnessing gravity in this way are either being exploited already or are unavailable for other reasons such as environmental considerations. Growth to 2030 is expected mostly in China and Latin America. China is commissioning the $26 billion Three Gorges dam, which will produce 18 GWe, but it has displaced over 1.2 million people.
The chief advantage of hydro systems is their capacity to handle seasonal (as well as daily) high peak loads. In practice the utilisation of stored water is sometimes complicated by demands for irrigation which may occur out of phase with peak electrical demands.”
Here in British Columbia, Canada’s version of California ,the liberal government, nicknamed the Fiberals because of past and ongoing lies and corruption have applied a carbon tax. Oh by the way BC is also the home of David Suzuki and Andrew Weaver. This carbon tax is applied to so called fossil fuels so that ups the cost to school districts, hospitals and such. Now money from this carbon tax is supposed to be applied to environmental initiatives and c02 emissions reductions. Some of the money just happens to windup in the pockets of companies and luxury resorts of fiberal friends under the cloak of emissions reduction.
Now with this the fiberals supported the development of Independent Power Producers, IPP’s. The IPP’s are run of the river and windpower private projects. These projects are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer and read like a book of fiberal cronyism. BC Hydro the government run utility is also forced to buy the power from these IPP’s at a rate higher than what Hydro can produce from its own generation.
Now because of the IPP contracts and other money loosing dealings over the years and dispite our vast natural resouses the province is now heavily in dept. Oh the fiberals have now picked a fight with the teachers as a diversion.
Now added to all this the natives of Haida Qwaii, formally know as the Queen Charlotte islands, self proclaimed stewards of the environment want to build a vast wind farm offshore in some of the wildest weather and roughest waters on earth. All for the protection of mother earth. My BS meter went off scale on that one.
C02 a vast money picking entity that has never before been seen. Though economies of the world and now starting to see the devastating results of this money picking.
I see the comment of the pad/base/ platform expense doubling the cost of the installation. In my opinion, the corrosion will greatly reduce the life of the tower and generator. The anti corrision maintenance expense will be double at least of on land expenses and the cost of getting a barge out in “calm” seas to raise a crane will be a hassle.
I have sailed for over 40 years and served in control of the harbormaster budgets for a little under 10 years.
About the time we have a leaker and the transmission explodes and dumps 600 gallons of oil in the water, the lawsuit will get the wind farm shut down.
Man Bearpig says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:11 am
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.
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I think many of us will see it in our lifetimes, or maybe it’ll be the new land and sea salvage boom. Fact is, the whole idea is totally unsustainable. Ironic, eh?
The Columbia Generating Station in Washington State is one of the few power reactors in the US capable of performing load-following operations. It does so through use of variable speed reactor coolant pumps which can be used to modulate the power output of the reactor core in real time.
If I remember correctly, the practical range of output runs between 65% and 100% of its rated 1100 MW capacity. The primary role of this nuclear station is now to stabilize the power grid in the Northwest against short-term variations in windpower and hydropower outputs.
Any way to get a web cam going to film the sea brids getting chop/chop as the blades hummm?
Sell the film to PETA, then film the naked protestors when they show up and sell that film to ,,, well you know.
cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 12:10 pm
cwj,
I think that usefulness and flexibility can be built into any original design. If your power generation is not flexible, then it’s poorly designed. I understand that a hydroelectric plant only needs to open a water gate to get the turbines to start spinning up again. They respond very quickly. I suggest leaving the nuclear plant running “full steam” or “full heat” and as long as you maintain steam pressure the steam turbines would spin up not far behind the water driven ones. When the turbines are shut off, the steam can be used to pump water uphill for supplemental hydroelectric power in the right location. You keep the plant running full bore whether it’s generating electricity or pumping water or steam heating homes or steam heating planting fields for an early harvest. It’s all in the original design and how and where you build it.
The coal plant is a different issue especially if you want to reduce CO2. Leaving the coal plant running “full steam” is wasting coal, and adding CO2, and shutting down the boiler is understandable. And I do think that having multiple boilers and multiple turbines on each boiler would be better suited to the load situation. So, if it is one boiler and one turbine as standard construction then I think that is a poor design for the task.
Also, I don’t think that leaving the nuclear plant running “hot” is “wasting” nuclear fuel. It’s not adding the evil CO2 and one can use the steam to do other work, like the water pumping I mentioned.
I am confident that a nuclear power plant could be designed and constructed to be rapidly responsive to load.
Disko Troop – a little learning about the ebb and flow of the tides can leave you a long way short of a reasonable understanding of the potential of tidal currents at numerous points/locations around the British Isles. I think you need to take a trip out to one of the thousands of areas where there is a rapid tidal flow for upwards of 18 hours a day. And even where it’s not rapid – around most of our less rugged and varied shores – the key thing is that there is considerable flow over a vast area . . . . funnelling slower waters into narrower streams and having reversible equipment that catches the flow in both directions – surely not beyond the modern mind – are just two of the methods by which even a modest and variable flow can be captured. GIven the chance to see one of these tidal streams in action a half decent problem solving mind will immediately recognise the enormous and regular power that;s there to be tapped. A visit by boat to the Mull of Galloway for example, on an average sized tide would open up a world of possibility to you, far beyond the notions of tide tables. If understanding such as yours is widespread amongst those who would make judgements in such matters, then perhaps that explains the lack of developent.
Jean Parisot says:
March 5, 2012 at 5:40 am
At some point this scandal is going turn from the poor science to the rampant stock manipulation conducted by those with close links to politicians. That’s when it will really hit the fan.
You must have not been paying attention – have a look at who funded/founded and operates or operated the Chicago Climate Exchange and the various European emission trading schemes.
Wind power won’t work, mainly because of the huge quantity of concrete required for it’s anchorage. The amount of embodied energy required to manufacturer cement needed for concrete is astronomical. This is the primary reason the EROEI is 1.
Wind power is unsustainable on land and twice as bad offshore.
If you want your wind-farm to do well, the secret is the fertilizer, put down a good layer of unicorn manure and the crop will take right off!
Many so called nuclear power boosters but want “safer” thorium reactors are are somewhat confused. They will likely get neither.
Merely “standardising” the existing LWR designs has taken two decades and mega- Billions of dollars. Plus they started with functioning designs that are running safely for some twenty years already.
You can’t really expect a thorium reactor to be licensed in less than twenty five years from the date that you begin to do so. No one has done so ,and it takes an organization/firm with Billions of dollars to spend to even creditably begin.
Commercial Fusion is probably as close, and won’t need anywhere near that amount of time to secure a license, because they are inherently safe. They can’t run away; and there is no great store of radioactive materials in a Fusion reactor to fear. If you don’t work very hard to maintain the appropriate conditions, the thermonuclear fire just goes out.
The “safer” nonsense is just that. Nonsense. There is nothing “safer’ about a thorium reactor that runs on/produces fissle U233. You can make bombs from U233, just as you can from U235 and PU 239. No one not even any of the rogue states have made a bomb from a commercial reactor. But LWRs have permanently incinerated over 10,000 nuclear weapons.
BTW, the people who negotiated the ” Megatons to Megawatts” treaty should have won a Nobel Peace Prize not phonies like Obama, Gore, and the CAGW hucksters.