From the “it’s OK, we used other people’s money” department and Andrew Follet at The Daily Caller:
Lake Land College recently announced plans to tear down broken wind turbines on campus, after the school got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support for wind power.
The turbines were funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, but the turbines lasted for less than four years and were incredibly costly to maintain.
“Since the installation in 2012, the college has spent $240,000 in parts and labor to maintain the turbines,” Kelly Allee, Director of Public Relations at Lake Land College, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning and likely suffered electrical damage last summer. School officials’ original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated. Under the original optimistic scenario, the turbines would have to last for 22.5 years just to recoup the costs, not accounting for inflation. If viewed as an investment, the turbines had a return of negative 99.14 percent.
“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,” she said. “One of the reasons for the lower than expected energy power is that the turbines often need to be repaired. They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.”
The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning and likely suffered electrical damage last summer.
Even though the college wants to tear down one of the turbines, they are federal assets and “there is a process that has to be followed” according to Allee.
The turbines became operational in 2012 after a 5-year long building campaign intended to reduce the college’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to fight global warming. Even though the turbines cost almost $1 million, but the college repeatedly claimed they’d save money in the long run.
“It is becoming more and more difficult for us financially to maintain the turbines,” Josh Bullock, the college’s president, told the Journal Gazette and Times-Courier last week. “I think it was an extremely worthy experiment when they were installed, but they just have not performed to our expectations to this point.”
Bullock states that the turbines simply haven’t been able to power the campus’ buildings and that most of the electricity wasn’t effectively used.
Lake Land plans to replace the two failed turbines with a solar power system paid for by a government grant. “[T]he photovoltaic panels are expected to save the college between $50,000 and $60,000 this year,”Allee told the DCNF.
Globally, less than 30 percent of total power wind capacity is actually utilized as the intermittent and irregular nature of wind power makes it hard to use.Power demand is relatively predictable, but the output of a wind turbine is quite variable over time and generally doesn’t coincide with the times when power is most needed. Thus, wind power systems require conventional backups to provide power during outages. Since the output of wind turbines cannot be predicted with high accuracy by forecasts, grid operators need to keep excess conventional power systems running.
Wind power accounted for only 4.4 percent of electricity generated in America in 2014, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Edgar County Watchdog adds:
Lake Land College (LLC) wind turbine history can be seen here:
2007-2010 COST BREAKDOWN:
2007: Wind feasibility study completed for $30,000
2010: LLC provided $500,000 from Illinois DCEO to “build one turbine.”
2010: LLC provided 18% of $2,542,762 from US Dept of Labor for “green job training program and related equipment including a 100 kW turbine.” (The turbine portion of this US DoL grant calculates to $457,697.20 per the small print details.)
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR TAXPAYER $987,697.20 spent to build these boondoggles?https://www.lakelandcollege.edu/as/tec/sustain/documents/Sustainability%20Media%20Guide%202012.pdf
Operation date: 2012
(read the comments from “gringa”in 2012……totally good point about it never paying for themselves)
“No mention of payback periods in this article. Seems like LLC would include the economic effectiveness of this investment in any discussion of it. After all, isn’t this all about return on investment? Maybe not. Wind is free, but the land and equipment and maintenance to that equipment is NOT free. “
in 2014, another article was written touting the “savings”:
LLC should update their college website “infomercial” found here since the turbines no longer (if ever) actually saved $44,000 per year per the over-optimistic claims:
https://www.lakeland.cc.il.us/as/tec/green_jobs/documents/EAR%20INSERT%20LLC%20May%202013.pdf
Just for fun, IF the turbines saved $44,000 per year, these two junkers would have to last 22.5 years, but they only lasted a shameful FOUR YEARS!!!!!
The Lake Land College Newsletter was full of praise in 2012:
Despite the bad weather, the first of the college’s two 100 kW wind turbines has been installed. This project is made possible by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding via the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and a Community-Based Job Training Grant from the U. S. Department of Labor.
The new turbines will offer students advanced training for large-scale turbine maintenance and energy production. They will also power buildings on campus with alternative energy, further reducing the cost of utilities for Lake Land College. Because Lake Land College officials and experts worked with the manufacturer to create customized turbines, it is projected that there will be a significant return on this investment of Class Two wind speeds, making these turbines a very affordable option for the college.
The two turbines are estimated to produce more than 220,000 kilowatt hours each year, thereby reducing the number of kilowatt hours of electricity needed by 440,000. The college estimates that the initial energy savings will be around $44,000 annually.
What exactly does this mean? Here’s a real-world example: the average Illinois home consumes 1,100 kilowatt hours each month. The two turbines should produce 36,667 kilowatt hours each month. Based on this information, the two turbines could produce enough energy to power the average Illinois home for just over 33 months, or 2.8 years!
Source: Laker Low Down eNewsletter published January 26, 2012
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There are many lessons to be learned in Illinois. 1) Wind power involves over promising and under delivering much like the original nuclear power push at any price, 2) Federal stimulus funds were wasted on pet political biases with no report card followup, and 3) Illinois is a great place to study how not to run a State government or government budget or government pension plan or state constitution rigged by unions.
Anthony, this was cross-posted at Hot Air.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/28/failed-college-wind-turbine-investment-produces-nearly-negative-100-roi/
Shouldn’t someone be going to jail for misuse of the taxpayer’s money? Who has been fired?
“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,”
A miniature classroom working model would have cost a few hundred dollars and it wouldn’t have cost them a cent more in its lifetime. I can only assume the lesson learned here is to not waste other people’s money on expensive vanity projects.
Stanford is leading the way (back) to small wind turbines that break. It is long past the time to demand some accountability from arm wavers on performance metrics that include maintenance and repair costs.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2016/04/29/stanford-small-wind-arrays-can-outperform-conventional-wind-farms-with-no-bird-kill/?ss=energy#69a05bf77a9c
Petroleum Oil is the greenest form of energy produced by the Sun on our planet (Solar panel) formed through millions of years through decaying photosynthesis/plants ect to produce oxygen. People over time will come to realize that carbon “emissions” are simply returning carbon to feed the same plants. Burning oil believe it or not is probably the greenest form of energy, but of course it will take green kids a long time to understand this.
A bit late to this entry, but a few facts bear mentioning.
First, this article appears to be yet again an example of confirmation bias at WUWT against any example of a renewable energy source that has a problem. We have seen featured on WUWT, just from my memory, a wind turbine that caught fire, a wind turbine being de-iced by a helicopter, a solar power tower project that actually works but is in the news for barely missing its estimated production volume, and now this on a small wind turbine that did not perform as expected.
Second, a bit of research shows that this wind project, two small turbines of 100 kW each, cost a bit above average for that size wind turbine at barely over $400,000 US for the both. What is glaringly missing from the article, and the commentary above, is that one of the wind turbines was installed with a defective rotor bearing, so of course it never performed to expectations. This fact is from another article on the college’s wind turbines, see below.
“The 40-inch bearing is the cause of this disassembly, which is likely the result of a manufacturing error that came to light during the first months of the turbine’s operation,” explained Tillman. “We suspected this flaw was preventing the turbine from operating properly and Bora confirmed our suspicions. We can now move forward to make the repair and get the turbine back in working order.” — source: http://www.lakelandcollege.edu/dv/ccs/news/detail.cfm?id=1681
Third, the wind turbine manufacturer is Bora Energy, a very new company formed in 2010 that has only the Lake Land College project listed in its website news articles. It is very likely that the Bora company’s first project was these two wind turbines, as they were installed in 2012. It appears that Bora has a steep learning curve. Indeed, the failure of the Bora wind turbines is more of an outlier, and not the norm for the wind industry.
Fourth, the article mentions nothing at all about the US wind industry’s overall management of operating and maintenance costs. Readily available information from DOE shows annual average O&M costs of 0.5 to 1.0 cents US per kWh sold. However, as with most mechanical things, O&M costs increase with operating age. At 20 years, O&M for wind turbines is approximately 3 cents US per kWh. see my blog for “Wind Turbines Operations and Maintenance Costs: O&M is Key to Profitability”
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/wind-turbines-operations-and.html
What is indisputable is that utility-scale wind turbine projects work quite well, and the power flows when the wind blows. They have an average capacity factor of 34 percent in the US, which is actually better than all natural gas power plants at 29 percent, and barely less than the capacity factor for hydroelectric power plants at 37 percent.
What is also indisputable is that renewable energy worldwide produced the same amount of electricity, 1520 terra-Watt-hours in 2014 as did all of the planet’s nuclear power plants in 1986 combined, the year Chernobyl exploded and spewed radioactive particles across the northern hemisphere. In that almost 30-year span, renewables grew from almost nothing to an annual production of 1520 tWh. Unlike nuclear power, though, the growth of renewables is very likely to continue at a very rapid pace.
If we, as a society, want to find out what wind power can do, then end all subsidies and invest 10% of that amount into a series of structured incentive prizes, akin to the Project X prizes. Ten million for a home sized turbine that costs $15,000, five million for a household sized battery pack or method of storing electricity that will last a home for 72 hours and run for 15 years without replacement and cost $5,000, and then different amounts for scaled up turbines and methods of electrical/energy storage. (All numbers are arbitrary and pulled out of thin air…I don’t know what makes sense).
When someone can put forward devices that can accomplish these things, then there will be no need for mandates for renewables, the public will purchase them. Instead of forcing a prefered by political hacks solution, through open the gates of creativity and the free market system and risk no money but the offered prizes.
I don’t know what the fuss is. As long as it doesn’t get hit by lightening more than once every 22.5 years, and nothing bad ever happens, they can break even.
You can’t put a price on good intentions. At least they cared!