Hi all!
Following this week’s Twitter exchange between Matt Ridley and Mark Lynas I thought a helpful fact sheet about Wind Energy would be useful. People can print it out, send to their relatives, MPs, Senators etc etc.
Thanks!
Josh
=============================================================
Let’s look at that big zero in the context of world energy. According to this Bloomberg article (cited by Wikipedia) Wind power capacity now totals 238 gigawatts worldwide at end of 2011
China leads the world in installs in 2011, That figures, as they have all the rare earth metals needed.
Total world energy generation in 2011…can’t seem to find that yet. EIA/IEA reports don’t seem to be out yet for 2011. Last figure I can find from Wikipedia is:
132,000 TWh for 2008 with growth of 5% in 2010. so figure 140 Terawatt hours.
140 terawatt hours = 140 000 gigawatt hours
wind power in 2011 = 238 gigawatt hours (installed potential capacity, actual output is far less)
% of 238/140,000 = 0.16999999999999998 ~ .17 %
(Update, I misread the Wikipedia data, conflating Gigawatt hours with gigawatts, totally different. Thanks to HaroldW and others for pointing out my unit error. – Anthony
Harold W adds in comments:
The installed capacity of wind power is 238 GW.
Average efficiency is perhaps 20% (arguably a little higher or lower).
At that rate, energy produced annually is 417 TWh.
Fraction is still 0%, to the nearest whole number.)
417 TWh at 20% efficiency, calculates to 0.32% (417/132,000) This matches the Wikipedia chart below
Nearest whole number then is, zero.
Matt Ridley’s excellent essay, The beginning of the end of wind, in the first line says:
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero.
That links to this Wikipedia graph:
Again, the nearest whole number to 0.3% is zero. But that data is from 2006, rendered in 2008, the citation says:
An attempt at showing world energy usage types with a bar graph. (Meant to replace w:Image:Cascading Pie charts.png by User:Mierlo, which uses a pie chart with misleading numbers like 41% for solar heating, when it’s actually 41% of 9% of 14% = 0.5%.) Values are taken from the pie chart, which is originally from the data in REN21 2006 global status report on renewables and the BP 2006 Statistical review (most recent data available at http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview)
I suspect the growth in other energy sectors pushed wind back a bit since then. And remember, these numbers are for installed capacity, which assumes the wind blows and the turbine functions at 100%, which we’ve seen in practice never happens at 100%.
Only birds that get all oiled up but do NOT die count. Also, when you start talking real numbers an environmental will get very mad and most likely walk away yelling slurs at you.
Great work on bringing some perspective to real problems. Personally, I’m just going to go long on Unicorn Farts.
_Jim says:
March 13, 2012 at 7:23 am
SadButMadLad says on March 10, 2012 at 9:26 am
A few points.
Turbines might kill a few birds, but a few birds were also killed by high voltage power lines.
How; can you please elaborate?
Bear in mind the distances between the nearest ‘ground’ point and a high tension wire can be 8 to 10 feet in a *vertical* direction (an insulator from a line/wire/HV cable to its mount) with additional distances (clearance) in other directions.
Jim, many large birds are killed by flying into the lines – not electrocution, but physical damage. In the Uk and Spain for example, main OH power lines transiting known flight paths are ‘marked’ with fluorescent globes to warn the birds there is something there to avoid.
Kasuha says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:15 pm
There’s a lot I don’t like on this comic……………………
They require permanent fossil fuel back up – not really. They require permanent backup, that’s it. But it does not really have to be fossil fuel based, actually nuclear plants are better suitable as backups.
—————————————–
Yo, if you have nuclear power plants you don’t need bird slicers.
Remember, windmills replace evil CO2 generators not clean nuclear power plants.
Unless you somehow lose your ability to apply logic as the folks in Germany must have.
I disagree with your picture up there. I’ve been to wind farms in ND. they were on cleared farmland, they were less noisy than some home fans I’ve heard. In fact, they had sort of a rythym to them that I slept under once. Birds, who learned not to fly into reflective windows in cities learn to avoid the blades, as do bats. Birds are smart. it’s one of the reason they sit in the center of power lines and not near the groundings. “They require fossil fuel backups” Well, duh! The point is you do NOT run the fossil fueled devices AS MUCH as you would if they did not exist.
As for the jobs part: Um, okay, and horse shoe makers laid off people when car use grew.
I don’t mind you don’t like wind power. I’m not sure you’ve ever visited a wind farm. The ones i saw … well, they reminded me of dirgibles. Majestic and peaceful. The farm land around the devices were being used for crops and the farms were so successful they were building a new complete sections for another group of them.
In addition to this, there’s a farm I pass on the way back from Indiana. For years the good sized farm had one wind mill. When I passed by last year he now had five. i don’t think he built them just for funzies.
No, they get paid Big Bucks, actually a minute fraction of the subsidies the builder receives. Many come to regret the bargain, once sleep deprivation takes its toll. Infrasound can’t be heard, but it can mess you up good. Research WTS.
The BBC World Service told me last night that wind has now overtaken nuclear by 40% in worldwide installed power. That shows bias. The neutral way to express this, assuming sensible capacity factors, would be that nuclear is still over 100% ahead of wind in delivered power in spite of insane subsidies proclaiming the creation of an electricity market but in fact creating an electricity mafia. But all this has inspired me to invent a new generator – not nuclear, not wind, but the THOUGHT GENERATOR. I guarantee that the even the tiny prototype I have made (by putting my thoughts in a bottle when stranded on a desert island and throwing it into the sea) will provide 1,000 terawatt installed power. As yet the capacity factor is 0%, but that’s no great problem.
What did the message say? “Please leave me here until all the wind turbines have caught fire, thrown their blades, fallen over or been blown up by ITT (International Turbine Terrorists).”