Press Release
London, 6 August: The Global Warming Policy Foundations has warned policy makers that wind energy is an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions. In fact, there is a significant likelihood that annual CO2 emissions could be greater under the Government’s current wind strategy than under an alternative Gas scenario.
Professor Gordon Hughes (University of Edinburgh), on behalf of the GWPF, has also assessed the likely impact of wind power on household energy bills.
In his economic analysis, submitted by the GWPF to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, Prof Hughes concludes that meeting the Government’s target for renewable generation would increase households electricity bills by 40-60% by 2020.
The necessary investment for this Wind scenario would amount to about £124 billion. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion – the latter option is cheaper by an order of magnitude.
According to Professor Hughes, “the average household electricity bill would increase from £528 per year at 2010 prices to a range from £730 to £840 in 2020 under the Mixed Wind scenario. These figures amount to increases of 38% to 58% in the average household bill relative to the baseline under the Gas scenario. The equivalent ranges for the other scenarios are 29-46% for the More Onshore Wind scenario and 40-62% for the Future Offshore Wind scenario.”
“The key problems with current policies for wind power are simple. They require a huge commitment of investment to a technology that is not very green, in the sense of saving a lot of CO2, but which is certainly very expensive and inflexible. Unless the current Government scales back its commitment to wind power very substantially, its policy will be worse than a mistake, it will be a blunder,” Professor Hughes said.
The GWPF’s submission to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change public evidence session on the Economics of Wind Power Committee is available here: Gordon Hughes: The Impact of Wind Power On Household Energy Bills.
Professor Gordon Hughes
Dr Gordon Hughes is a Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches courses in the Economics of Natural Resources and Public Economics. He was a senior adviser on energy and environmental policy at the World Bank until 2001. He has advised governments on the design and implementation of environmental policies and was responsible for some of the World Bank’s most important environmental guidelines. Professor Hughes is the author of the GWPF reports The Myth of Green Jobs and Why is wind power so expensive?
Kum Dollison, don’t be silly. Electric power is never free.
Tell that to the TXU Energy customers.
cwoop
That chart would do well as an example for the encyclopedia definition of chaos.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — During the early morning hours of April 15, with a steady breeze blowing down Colorado’s Front Range, the state’s biggest utility set a U.S. record — nearly 57% of the electricity being generated was coming from wind power.
As dawn came and the 1.4 million customers in Xcel Energy’s service district began turning on the lights, toasters and other appliances, the utility’s coal and natural gas-fired power plants ramped up production and brought wind’s contribution back closer to its 2012 average of 17%
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/06/news/economy/wind-power-Colorado/index.htm?iid=HP_LN
From the above link:
The idea behind the subsidies and mandates is to foster a market for wind and other renewable power sources so the technology can be perfected and economies of scale reached to the point where they can compete on their own.
The strategy appears to be working — AWEA said the costs for turbines has decreased 33% over the last three years.
Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
August 6, 2012 at 10:50 am
Among the current darlings of the “clean renewable” crowd we have wind and solar. Both are unreliable in the sense they cannot be made to produce power on demand. Solar is at least reliably unreliable — that is for any given location and date you can calculate the maximum possible output, and know that you will get something less than that. And every day has at least some sunlight. Wind on the other hand is unreliably unreliable, as we can’t even predict a baseline. Wind can go to zero and stay there for days, or get so strong the turbines must be feathered to protect them from damage.
In addition to its “power when the Gods smile” property, wind has the additional problem that the energy density simply isn’t there. If it were, we would still be moving passengers and cargo by sailing ships. We gave that up roughly 150 years ago when fossil fuel efficiency was much lower that we can achieve today. In the same 150 years the wind hasn’t gotten any stronger or steadier.
The best use of solar energy is to grow plants and then eat them. Or feed them to animals and eat the animals. Or grow trees and harvest them for attractive wood so the Gibson company can make nice pretty guitars, which folk-singers can use to protest how capitalism is destroying the world.
*
Alan? You have a way with words. You are soooo right. And I got a good chuckle out of your last paragraph. Perfection! 🙂
It would be okay to build a loooot of wind-turbines in Norway. Last year there was 39 new beaurocrats every day…..and noone cares…..
Not to mention the unbelievably high level of infrasonic pollution emanating from industrial wind farms. Energy is highest below 0.1 Hz, in the microbarom range. Those waves, due to extremely low attenuation, can propagate thousands of kilometers in the atmosphere, so pollution, if the technology is promoted further, is not even local. It is most definitely a global threat.
For this frequency range, although it has detrimental health effects, there is no regulation in place anywhere. One can’t even measure them using microphones (even the best ones have a sharp cutoff below 1 Hz). For this purpose special devices, microbarometers are needed (used to check compliance to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty).
Also, from the link:
According to a wind resources map published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas all have stronger winds.
Xcel credited its record wind rate with advances in technology.
The company recently updated its weather forecasting ability with tools that allow it to more accurately predict the strength and duration of the wind.
Xcel has also upgraded the software it uses to control its wind farms and fossil fuel plants.
f the wind begins to blow too hard, which can threaten the turbines, the software will automatically feather the blades, slowing them down, and direct the coal or natural gas plants to increase their output. When the wind dies down, the software can more seamlessly ramp up power from fossil plants.
Both of these measures allow Xcel to feel more comfortable powering down its fossil fuel generators for longer periods of time and giving its wind turbines center stage.
“The wind is a free fuel resource,” said Drake Bartlett, a trading analyst at Xcel. “We want to try to take that as much as possible.”
The UK’s “John Muir Trust” an environmental outfit, used Stuart Young consulting to do an analysis on wind power in the UK.
The Report; ” Analysis of UK Wind Power Generation; Nov 2008 to Dec 2010″ was released in Mar 2011.
http://www.jmt.org/assets/pdf/Report_Analysis%20UK%20Wind_SYoung.pdf
The summary of the report is devastating to wind power but seems to have been totally ignored by everybody, no doubt deliberately so ,as the wind power industry scammers grabbed for every tax payer dollar they could scam out of the bleeding public with the straight out connivance of a corrupt political system.
The report’s findings were completely contrary to the UK’s political and media “progressive’ meme of only a year or so ago.
How times change and we are only seeing the tip of the changes as yet that are about to overturn the old order of the last two thirds of a century and usher in a new order, the likes of which we cannot yet envisage.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
in respect of analysis of electricity generation from all the U.K. windfarms which are metered by National Grid,
November 2008 to December 2010
The following five statements are common assertions made by both the wind industry and Government representatives and agencies. This Report examines those assertions.
1. “Wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year.”
2. “The wind is always blowing somewhere.”
3. “Periods of widespread low wind are infrequent.”
4. “The probability of very low wind output coinciding with peak electricity demand is slight.”
5. “Pumped storage hydro can fill the generation gap during prolonged low wind periods.”
This analysis uses publicly available data for a 26 month period between November 2008 and December 2010 and the facts in respect of the above assertions are:
1. Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.
2. There were 124 separate occasions from November 2008 till December 2010 when total generation from the windfarms metered by National Grid was less than 20MW. (Average capacity over the period was in excess of 1600MW).
3. The average frequency and duration of a low wind event of 20MW or less between November 2008 and December 2010 was once every 6.38 days for a period of 4.93 hours.
4. At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
5. The entire pumped storage hydro capacity in the UK can provide up to 2788MW for only 5 hours then it drops to 1060MW, and finally runs out of water after 22 hours.
OTHER FINDINGS
have emerged in the course of this analysis in addition to the Principal Findings which related to the testing of five common assertions. These Other Findings are listed below.
1. During the study period, wind generation was:
• below 20% of capacity more than half the time.
• below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.
• below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve.
• below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month.
The discovery that for one third of the time wind output was less than 10% of capacity, and
often significantly less than 10%, was an unexpected result of the analysis.
2. Among the 124 days on which generation fell below 20MW were 51 days when generation was 10MW or less. In some ways this is an unimportant statistic because with 20MW or less output the contribution from wind is effectively zero, and a few MW less is neither here nor there. But the very existence of these events and their frequency – on average almost once every 15 days for a period of 4.35 hours – indicates that a major reassessment of the capacity credit of wind power is required.
3. Very low wind events are not confined to periods of high pressure in winter. They can occur at any time of the year.
4. The incidence of high wind and low demand can occur at any time of year. As connected wind capacity increases there will come a point when no more thermal plant can be constrained off to accommodate wind power. In the illustrated 30GW connected wind capacity model with
“must-run” thermal generation assumed to be 10GW, this scenario occurs 78 times, or 3 times a month on average. This indicates the requirement for a major reassessment of how much wind capacity can be tolerated by the Grid.
5. The frequency of changes in output of 100MW or more over a five minute period was
surprising. There is more work to be done to determine a pattern, but during March 2011,
immediately prior to publication of this report, there were six instances of a five minute rise in
output in excess of 100MW, the highest being 166MW, and five instances of a five minute drop
in output in excess of 100MW, the highest being 148MW. This indicates the requirement for a
re-assessment of the potential for increased wind capacity to simulate the instantaneous loss (or gain) of a large thermal plant.
6. The volatility of wind was underlined in the closing days of March 2011 as this Report was
being finalised.
• At 3.00am on Monday 28th March, the entire output from 3226MW capacity was 9MW.
• At 11.40am on Thursday 31st March, wind output was 2618MW, the highest recorded to
date.
• The average output from wind in March 2011 was 22.04%.
• Output from wind in March 2011 was 10% of capacity or less for 30.78% of the time.
The nature of wind output has been obscured by reliance on “average output” figures. Analysis
of hard data from National Grid shows that wind behaves in a quite different manner from that
suggested by study of average output derived from the Renewable Obligation Certificates
(ROCs) record, or from wind speed records which in themselves are averaged.
It is clear from this analysis that wind cannot be relied upon to provide any significant level of
generation at any defined time in the future. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the
implications of reliance on wind for any significant proportion of our energy requirement.
The Scottish had to learn the hard way.
If only we had listened to the Greens and shut down ALL filthy nuclear power plants. Then maybe the AGW sceptics would have had a quick victory.
Ah, bollocks; the California ISO chart looks just like this, day after day. About 12% of Demand from Renewables.
http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20120805_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
Renewables have provided 26% of German Electricity in 2012.
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/26/germany-26-of-electricity-from-renewable-energy-in-1st-half-of-2012/
Kum Dollison: I have this wonderful car that costs only $500,000 but you get FREE fuel. Can I expect a check soon?
Oh, and the car only runs when the wind is blowing and/or the sun is shining.
The levelized cost of wind is right down there with coal, now. Give it a couple of years of increasesin the price of coal, and tell me what you think.
Drakvag says:
August 6, 2012 at 6:23 am
As a Swede I must say, this article is pure bullshit! 😉
Here in Sweden the costs for wind energy is very low, as most of the wind power plants are built besides, or very close to, where we already have water power plants…..
____________________________________
The best use of Wind Power is to pump water. Moving water from a low reservoir to a high reservoir acts as a battery and allows the power to be generated as needed. That was my plan for energy self-sufficiency.
Once you get away from that combination Wind Power become a problem because it is erratic and upsets the load balance. The area of occupied Sweden is slightly larger than the state of California. In the USA the areas picked for wind mills are well away from energy transmission lines in many cases. We settled the valleys and plains the wind is on the mountain tops.
You really have no idea of how large this country is. It takes days to drive from one side to the other despite our highway system. Heck I have to drive 2-3 hrs just to get out of my state!
Kum Dollison says:
“The levelized cost of wind is right down there with coal, now.”
On your planet, maybe.
Don’t forget Smokey, the “levelized cost” means making up all sorts of additional costs to the “commons”, based on wild extrapolation and multiplying statistically insignificant hypothesized health effects by large population numbers as well as all the weather disaster costs blamed on the coal production.
My “planet” is called Earth. What do you call yours?
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/26/in-parts-of-india-wind-energy-proving-cheaper-than-coal/
What’s a “levelized cost”? That’s not an accounting or finance term I’m familiar with. Where did it come from? Is that some new Orwellian term?
Martin Lack says:
August 6, 2012 at 8:13 am
Doesn’t change the fact that fossil fuels will run out one day and/or that burning them is damaging our environment. When you know you’re in a hole it is wise to stop digging.
_______________________
So Martin, You are FOR Nuclear, RIGHT?
Oh and wildly exaggerated environmental cost numbers from mining and transportation as well. All conveniently ignoring the similar extra costs from wind, large footprint destroying landscapes and ecosystems, massive extra decentralized transmission costs, load balancing costs of intermittent power sources, and the requirement for constant 100% backup from more stable sources of energy, like *cough*, coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Thanks, jeez. I figured it was BS.
Slightly off topic, but I just discovered my “levelized” basketball skills are actually greater than LeBron James — lawsuit against the NBA is pending.
That’s not how you figure levelized cost. Go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelised_energy_cost
Oh, btw, Wind 96.8 and Coal 99.6
kwik says:
August 6, 2012 at 3:17 pm
It would be okay to build a loooot of wind-turbines in Norway. Last year there was 39 new beaurocrats every day…..and noone cares…..
_____________________________
Now there is the REAL renewable resource.
Use windmills to pump water from wells into containment areas. Use the water to irrigate crops that store the sun’s energy via photosynthesis. Feed the plants (Brussels sprouts and turnips maybe?) to the bureaucrats. Place the bureaucrats on treadmills used to turn generators. After 6 months of 16 hour days (you can eat while walking) have the bureaucrats write reports on the glories of renewable energy.