Guest post by Steve Goreham
The U.S. wind industry is in despair. The Production Tax Credit (PTC), a subsidy of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour to producers of electricity from wind turbines, is set to expire at the end of this year. The American Wind Energy Association cites a study by Navigant Consulting, claiming that, “…37,000 Americans stand to lose their jobs by the end of the first quarter of 2013 if Congress does not extend the PTC.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups have rushed to the defense of the PTC. The Sierra Club states, “At a time when we need clean energy more than ever, we simply cannot afford to let the PTC expire.” The PTC is the cornerstone of President Obama’s green energy program and a key measure supported by environmental efforts to fight global warming.
The Production Tax Credit was established by the Energy Policy Act of 1992 to support the nascent wind industry. But twenty years later, is this subsidy still needed? By the end of 2011, 39,000 wind turbine towers were operating in the United States and about 185,000 turbines were in operation worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency. This is no longer an infant industry. Despite the large number of wind towers, wind provides less than one percent of U.S. energy and less than one percent of global energy. A one-year extension of the PTC would cost American taxpayers over $12 billion.
In September, 19 companies sent a letter to the leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives, urging extension of the PTC. Why would Johnson & Johnson, Sprint, Starbucks, and other signers of the letter support subsidies for another industry? They voiced concern that “Failure to extend the PTC for wind would tax our companies and thousands of others like us that purchase significant amounts of renewable energy…”
Never has corporate America been so misguided. Foolish policies like the PTC and proactive company programs to buy “green” renewable energy are based on Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. An increasing body of science shows that climate change is natural and that human emissions are insignificant. Nevertheless, Johnson & Johnson’s web site claims a reduction of 23 percent in carbon dioxide emissions from 1990‒2010. That emissions reduction and two bucks might get you a cup of Starbuck’s coffee.
While many people would like to power the world with zephyrs, the intermittency of the wind means that wind turbines cannot replace conventional nuclear, natural gas, or coal power plants. The 39,000 U.S. wind turbines generated only 29% of their rated output during 2011. When the wind doesn’t blow, conventional power plants must provide backup power if continuity of electrical supply is to be maintained.
In fact, electricity sourced from wind turbines does not cut CO2 emissions from a power system. Because of the rapid variation in the wind, backup coal or natural gas power plants must frequently and inefficiently cycle on and off to support demand. Studies from electrical power systems in Netherlands, Colorado, and Texas show that combined wind-conventional systems emit more CO2 and use more fuel than conventional systems alone.
Wind is also more costly than conventional systems. Analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) shows that electricity from both coal and natural gas is much less expensive than from wind power, without requiring subsidies for operation. The DOE estimates the world has 200 years of technically recoverable reserves of natural gas, thanks to the hydraulic fracturing revolution. If the theory of man-made global warming is wrong, why subsidize another wind turbine?
The government can always provide subsidies to create jobs or to sustain jobs, but this may not be the best public policy. Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, “It is error alone which requires the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” Suppose we let the wind industry compete on its own merit?
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania
John in L du B says:
November 28, 2012 at 6:31 am
Reality check says:
“Since John in L du B seems a reasonable sort who is not a NIMBY, maybe we can find out where he lives and put in a nuclear power plant next door.”
Many of us here have lobbied for a nuclear generating station….
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Good for you.
And unlike the rocking chair ecofreaks I live what I preach too. I can see the cooling tower of the local nuclear plant from my window.
Nuclear is the way to go. If we had spent the money on nuclear research (mini thorium plants) instead of CAGW we would have lifted many many people all over the world out of poverty by now. Of course that has never been the objective. Money from the poor TO the wealthy is the objective.
I wonder how much the sea level would decline if desalination was used to ‘Green’ the Sahara?
In California, Chevron, have consistently maintained, that they can produce an oxygenate free gasoline, that easily meets all the performance specifications (and that means including all pollution standards, as to EPA and CARB regulations.) But Sacramento is beholden to corn interests, who want to stiff California driverss to buy their ethanol. Well if I want to buy ethanol, which I occasionally do, I prefer to buy it as a naturally occurring “oxygenate” in some of California’s fine red wines. I don’t buy those overhyped “Cabernet” reds though; the yuppies are welcome to those; they suit their beemer/lexus life style.
California reformulated gasoline is an advance though; the major improvement, is the big reduction of sulphur and Benzene. You see, “big oil” really do look out for their customers.
We all buddied up to get the nutballs in Sacramento to get the MTBE out, and we should do it again to get the ethanol out. Ethers, just like alcohols, are the same as Alkyls with water added, and for ages we paid good money to the oil companies to burn up their garbage, so they didn’t have to pay to dispose of it. Well at least with ethanol, you can drink it (in moderation) which is more than you can say for MTBE or ETBE.
“””””…..
Reality check says:
November 28, 2012 at 10:18 am
How much of the low wind production goes to converting from DC to AC? Some of the small turbines I have read about use the first 3 to 6 mph winds to accomplish the conversion, so you really don’t get usable power until 7 or 8 mph. How many batteries would be required? I am curious because I know several people who use turbines for their electricity and it seems to take a large number of batteries, controllers, etc. Are these any different?…..”””””
Well if you are talking about the buy it at Fry’s “wind chime” generators (is it really a turbine), how would the wind know if it was generating power or converting DC to AC or verse vicea.
It would seem that the big units generate AC, as they are usually all phase locked when they are actually putting out power, so I assume they are Alternators, rather than DC generators. I assume they would have to have some fancy mechanical instantaneous responding phase/frequency responding transmission system , to adapt to wind gusts, or drop outs. Pure free running DC (or AC) put out whatever you can , and then electronic conversion to grid locked AC, would seem less troublesome, but then why mechanically phase lock the windmill.
And when the wind speed drops to half your design speed, there goes 87 1/2 percent of your generating capacity.
At least Hydro dams, have exquisite control of the fuel input (water flow KE) to allow their alternators to run line synchronized to the grid, in the face of variable load demand.
The Electric Power Industry, is an impressive tour de force in how to run a tight ship. So the bigger the system gets, the more opportunities for a snafu; but overall, their record is quite impressive, and anyone who doesn’t think so, obviously has never built anything that works in their life. Misteaks are still made. The Fukushima emergency cooling system, and backup, being a case in point. Probably designed by the same type of people, who designed the Benghazi Consulate defense system, or the ipad/pod/pid/ped/pud mapping system, or M$ Windows. How can you need to apply 100 megabytes of Johnson’s bandaids every three days or so, to stop your creation from bleeding. Just how big would windows be, if they stripped out all the 10,000 layers of boy scout bandages, and just put back in what is needed to make stuff go.
Windows just connects MY ray tracing software to my keyboard/mouse/flat screen, and OctoCPU, as near as I can discern.
@George-I was referring to home systems that use batteries for storage. You have to convert from the battery DC to AC (with a true sine wave if you are running major electronics) in order to use the electricity in most modern homes. I use solar at my cabin and do not convert because the inverter eats up the batteries. (Wind does not know what “type of electricity” it generates, no. My wording was clumsy. Apologies.) The industrial turbines have permanent magnetic alternators (rare earth magnets, I think) and feed AC into the grid. AC off a home turbine would mean you only have power when the wind blows, just like with the industrial ones unless you are wired into the grid. Then you use wind when it’s there and grid when it’s not.
@John in L du B: I am happy to see you are not a NIMBY and are a fan of nuclear power. I have no problem with the idea of a nuclear plant near my home, and there may be a uranium mine near my cabin. I do object to the multiple useless turbines, not because of the view, but the uselessness of the project.
This kind of idiocy and the climate-gate emails, was my inspiration for this fact;
Your opinion of your govt will never be higher, than it is today.
Sorry but there it is .
Govt must be kept small and powerless. Otherwise the clueless and useless come to infest the structure as we see today.
This is our wealth being used to push us into poverty.
Sure its a fact, this is climate science.
“””””…..Reality check says:
November 28, 2012 at 1:22 pm
@George-I was referring to home systems that use batteries for storage. You have to convert from the battery DC to AC (with a true sine wave if you are running major electronics) in order to use the electricity in most modern homes. I use solar at my cabin and do not convert because the inverter eats up the batteries.
Well #1 Reality, I am NEVER against any one (free person) taking local advantage of whatever is going around. Sounds like you have a situation, that makes a do it yourself energy source practical for you. In which case; “ripper Mate”, glad you can do it.
And I’m all for your off grid approach, with batteries. Now if you can do out your cabin in LED lighting (off the shelf real stuff), so much the better.
Makes no sense to turn wind juice into grid AC at substantial efficiency loss, and as you noted battery eating high current spikes; only to then re-convert the grid AC back to low Voltage (12-24 Volt) DC to power LED lighting.
I have nothing but off the shelf (Home Depot) LED lighting in the house I am renting, and if I was in my own house, I would rewire ALL of the lighting for 24 Volt DC for LEDs, with battery storage (couple of Die Hards), and put up a solar cell array to just run the lights. Then I don’t need PV to AC inversion either.
So you get a gold star Reality, for doing what comes naturally for your situation.
But at only 1 kW/m^2 before efficiency losses, large scale solar either PV of wind will never be affordable for massive systems.
My total lighting is 200 Watts of juice with every light in the house on. We never have more than half on, so a couple of 100 Amp Hour car batteries would do the trick.
If you’ve got wind where your cabin is, sounds like a plan to me (for you)
As WUWT has said in the recent past, the wind power industry is not yet competitive without subsidies. But, if a mere 2.2 cents subsidy per whatever few KWH generated by wind turbines can save 37,000 jobs, then I think this is a bargain. I think the debate should be primarily if so little subsidy can actually save so many jobs.
Since article-writers at WUWT tend to try for minimizing or negating effects of CO2 from fossil fuels, I think they would have a better argument on basis of economics than on basis of failing to reduce CO2 emissions or very slightly increasing them.
Donald Klipstein says:
“…if a mere 2.2 cents subsidy per whatever few KWH generated by wind turbines can save 37,000 jobs, then I think this is a bargain.”
Please familiarise yourself with Frederic Bastiat. Start with the Broken Window Fallacy.
When the wind isn’t blowing, conventional power has to be kept on.
When the wind is blowing, conventional power has to be kept on in case the wind suddenly stops.
How does wind turbines reduce co2 from (coal, oil, gas) power generation?
And here is the result – a toxic lake in China as well as:
@george.e.Smith: if I was in my own house, I would rewire ALL of the lighting for 24 Volt DC for LEDs,
I wonder what it would cost to install parallel power systems, (220-110v 60Hz and 24-12v DC (3-wire)) in a new home? What would the payout time be?
And would it be practical if you did? In one sense, I would love to get rid of large number of transformers that litter the house these days. But CAN you get rid of them? Not everything will take 24 or 12v. My Vaio laptop transformer outputs 19.5 v. One of the beauties of AC is it is relatively easy to change voltages with minimal loss to heat. DC is tougher without converting to AC first.
@Stephen Fisher: Installing parallel power systems sounds a lot like using wind and natural gas. I cannot see how it would be practical and I would think from looking at friends with wind/solar the payout would be far in the future. Living off the grid is not cheap. My cabin is mostly DC by design. My home is not. The only “cross-over” benefits to this arrangement is I bring my cabin’s batteries and lights, etc, home in the winter (cabin is not really accessible in the winter) and when my AC line electricity goes out I have plenty of backup! I even have a solar panel to charge a battery and use an inverter to keep my water line from freezing (runs my heat tape). AC is more flexible which is part of why we use it large scale. You’re probably stuck with the transformers. 🙂
Ironically I was just at some other site that had some wind advocate bloviating in the comments section that wind farms pay for themselves within 5 years and that wind would be cheaper than coal in 20XX. What is with these people?
“””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
November 29, 2012 at 9:27 am
@george.e.Smith: if I was in my own house, I would rewire ALL of the lighting for 24 Volt DC for LEDs,
I wonder what it would cost to install parallel power systems, (220-110v 60Hz and 24-12v DC (3-wire)) in a new home? What would the payout time be?……””””””
Well I said if I was in MY OWN house, meaning not one designed by beurocrats. I’m sure electric codes don’t allow you to do your own thing.
Newer LED lighting products, are quite often designs based on strings of six (blue) LED junctions in series, which comes to about 18 Volts forward Voltage. So the drivers are current regulators designed to put out something in that 18 Volt range of Voltage. The blue LED is of course what pumps the yellow phosphor to create white light out of the mixture. Then you have to do Temperature compensation and dimmer functions, and try and do all of that with lossless conersion systems. My guess is it’s going to take some years of development and evolution to arrive at LED lighting standards, which will catch on. Of course, in the USA, we have that stupid Edison lamp ban, so everybody has to go to mercury poison lamps.
White LEDs are inherently more efficient than any existing fluorescent technology, either regular tubes or CFLs simply on the basis of Stokes shift energy loss, and potentially, three or four color LED mixtures avoid that Stokes shift loss, so can be higher efficiency still, but a lot more complex and expensive, since each color is a different LED material. Not too practical for volume lighting.
There’s a lot of track lighting that’s popular but not efficient, but standard Armstrong ceiling fluorescent fixtures are a total joke as regards optical efficiency, which is a shame, since they are also the one geometry case for which the theoretically ideal optical design exists, limited only by the second law of thermodynamics, and reflector efficiency.(95-98%).
Your children or grandchildren, will probably enjoy efficient lighting.
@Justa Joe: It’s called job security.
Think of it this way. These wind turbines have replaced/caused not to be built about 33 nuclear reactors. (I choose Nuclear because our Pres says we aren’t building any more coal…) This is a good thing, Then think of how many of YOUR TAX DOLLARS, went into Yucca Mountain, a facility that is not in use and which may never be put into service. But that is not called a “subsidy”. Then think about all the reactors in the US that have spent fuel pools FULL of spent fuel, because there is no where to put it. Then think of Fukushima, a reactor with the same spent fuel problem. Then tell me that 2.2 cents/kwh is not worth it.
rms,
2.2¢/kwh is not worth it. See my link to Bastiat above. 0.000002¢/kwh is not worth it.
Subsidies cost jobs. No exception, ever. The problem is that it’s easy to see the jobs “created” with subsidies. But the jobs lost through misallocation of resources are ‘things not seen’. There are always more jobs lost than are created with subsidies. No exception. Otherwise, the government could subsidize everything, and always have 100% full employment.
rms,
It seems like the nuke disposal problem is an issue created by the anti-nuke crowd (politics). If the goal is to generate electricity I’d take nuke over wind any day of the week.
Justa Joe says:
November 29, 2012 at 10:41 am
Ironically I was just at some other site that had some wind advocate bloviating in the comments section that wind farms pay for themselves within 5 years and that wind would be cheaper than coal in 20XX. What is with these people?
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They own stock in a wind company or are sheep following those with a vested interest.
Nuclear and Hydro are the only realistic non CO2 power sources. The rest are niche markets making a killing. Wind and solar and for that matter biofuel have been around for over 100 years. They got by passed because the do not work well for mass production of electrical energy.
Unfortunately the sheep are getting taken in by the ponsi scheme of CAGW. I just hope it collapses before it takes out western civilization too.
george e. smith says:
November 29, 2012 at 10:53 am
“””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
November 29, 2012 at 9:27 am
@george.e.Smith: if I was in my own house, I would rewire ALL of the lighting for 24 Volt DC for LEDs…
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It is not the lighting that is the big user of electric. It is all our appliances, A/C, heating, and most of all MANUFACTURING.
BTW the government uses a version of the ‘broken window fallacy’ when describing the wealth of a nation as GDP.
GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)
There are other similar formulas. However a nations wealth is actually derived from its mining, agriculture, building and manufacturing. Anything else is just different ways of divvying up that wealth. Neither a trucker moving a product, a store selling a product or the government taxing a product creates a darn thing.
Anything that limits the creation of that wealth is bad for the economy and the nation. Sooner or later that reality will come back and bite a nation in the rump. The USA is in the process of finding that out. The EU has already found it out and just has not accepted the fact.
rms says:
November 29, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Think of it this way. These wind turbines have replaced/caused not to be built about 33 nuclear reactors. (I choose Nuclear because our Pres says we aren’t building any more coal…) This is a good thing….
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No it is NOT.
The USA should have spent the money finishing the 1954 Aircraft Reactor Experiment. Now China is busy trying to STEAL the information so they can patent it. The Oak Ridge Labs have more Chinese visitors than anyone else and their computers have been hacked.
From rms on November 29, 2012 at 12:05 pm:
These wind turbines have replaced/caused not to be built about 33 nuclear reactors.
They have replaced exactly ZERO nuclear reactors, as nukes are used for dependable 24/7 baseload generation. Windmills are only transient sources.
Then think of how many of YOUR TAX DOLLARS, went into Yucca Mountain, a facility that is not in use and which may never be put into service. But that is not called a “subsidy”.
Except under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 it is the nuke plant operators that are paying for a permanent nuclear waste repository, which was to have been Yucca Mountain. It was supposed to have started accepting waste back in 1998.
So the nuke plant operators HAVE PAID for it, not my tax dollars. They are still paying even more for it.
The operators have had to provide their own storage, after cool-down they use above-ground dry cask storage. The operators have resorted to what is their legal right, suing the government for return of those fees. Example. And they are winning.
So Yucca Mountain IS NOT A SUBSIDY. It was paid for by the nuclear industry, never delivered, the feds are still collecting payments for what they refuse to provide. Yucca Mountain, at this point, is a blatant rip-off of the industry and ultimately of the utilities’ customers.
Then think about all the reactors in the US that have spent fuel pools FULL of spent fuel, because there is no where to put it.
The dry cask storage actually isn’t that bad, the pools are for the cooling-off period. We should have chemical reprocessing of spent fuel in this country.
If we had CANDU reactors in the US, which are thrifty and made for less-reactive fuels like natural un-enriched uranium, our normal “spent” fuel can be fed into a CANDU after physical reprocessing into CANDU pellets and fuel bundles. There is enough “spent” fuel from our light water reactors to power a fleet of CANDU’s for DECADES.
Then think of Fukushima, a reactor with the same spent fuel problem.
Actually it doesn’t, as Japan has a mature fuel reprocessing industry. The spent fuel at Fukushima was at the normal cool-down phase after getting pulled from the core.
Then tell me that 2.2 cents/kwh is not worth it.
You’ve been wrong on EVERY point. If you think it’s worth it, the trend shows it absolutely is not worth it.
Excellent, but not unexpected, response by you kadaka. It does seem that being green requires more emotion than factual understanding.
rms: Not a valid argument. Wind does not replace nuclear or anything else. If you insist on not using nuclear to lower CO2, then you have the choice of fossil fuels or living in the dark. Oh, and don’t forget those nasty rare earth elements that nature mixed in with radioactive materials and we have to separate them (worked out poorly in China) to make those big magnets for the turbines. Your argument is wind and nuclear are the only choices and a bad choice is better than no choice at all. Doesn’t work that way.