From Energy.gov
Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy
August 23, 2017
New energy science and technological breakthroughs could cut the cost of wind energy in half by 2030—making it fully competitive with the fuel cost of natural gas.
This new finding is outlined in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that examines the future of wind power plants—backed by the supercomputing power of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories.
Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e): Enabling the Wind Plant of Tomorrow
Watch and learn more about DOE’s Atmosphere to Electrons initiative
It’s part of DOE’s Atmosphere to Electrons initiative, which focuses on maximizing efficiencies at the plant level (i.e. how wind turbines interact with one another and the atmosphere) rather than treating each wind turbine as an individual unit. The next step is for DOE to apply high-performance computing to this grand challenge of better understanding the complex physics that control electricity generation by wind plants.
The Wind Plant of the Future
According to NREL, the wind plant of the future will use a collection of technologies that allow wind power plants and the turbines within them to not only respond to the atmosphere as an efficient, integrated system, but also to control the airflow within the plant to maximize power production. This approach is made possible by recent advances in supercomputing technology, which turns large sets of atmospheric and wind turbine operation data into a high-fidelity model. Industry can then use these government-driven scientific insights to design new wind turbine components, sensors, and controls. Future wind power plants would include:
- High-fidelity modeling and state-of-the-art sensors to accurately estimate wind power plant energy production, reducing uncertainty and increasing predictabilty of electricity production;
- Integrated wind plant design, real-time active control of turbines, and operational strategies to increase reliability and extend turbine lifetimes;
- Innovative design of wind turbines and components such as rotors and drivetrains to optimize performance and enhance energy capture, including larger rotors and taller towers to capture higher-potential wind energy in the Earth’s upper atmosphere; and
- Controllable, dispatchable, and predictable grid support services for grid resilience and stability, including precise forecasting of wind energy production for short-term grid operation and planning.
The wind power plant of tomorrow.
Illustration Josh Bauer, NREL
Wind’s Place in Shaping the Energy Landscape
The rise of wind energy over the past decade has been driven largely by technological advances that have made wind turbines more efficient at a lower cost. Wind was the third most-installed source of U.S. energy capacity in 2016 behind solar and natural gas. Between 2009 and 2016, installed project costs for new wind farms dropped 33%, while also generating more electricity per turbine.
Continued cost reductions will become even more important as wind’s main policy incentive, the federal production tax credit, expires in 2019. By leveraging high-performance computing and accelerating energy science R&D efforts for the wind plant of the future, wind energy costs could be cut in half by 2030 or sooner, bringing it below the projected fuel cost for natural gas.
Newly-built wind plants using production tax credits are already cost-competitive with new natural gas plants in some parts of the U.S., especially in the “wind belt” that runs from Texas to North Dakota. New energy science and technology breakthroughs outlined above could drop the unsubsidized cost of wind energy below the projected cost of fuel for existing natural gas plants by 2030.
Levelized cost of energy is the total cost of installing and operating a project per megawatt-hour of electricity generated by the project over its life. AEO projections are from the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook.
Read more from NREL or download the full report.
Liz Hartman is the Communications Lead for DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, and formerly (2009–2016) the Communications Lead for EERE’s combined Wind and Water Power Technologies Office.
OFFICE of ENERGY EFFICIENCY & RENEWABLE ENERGY
Forrestal Building
1000 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20585
HT/Roger Sowell (busy boy)
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The other issues , as raised by other contributors are understated in importance are the cost of supplying, in essence 100% back up for wind, the cost of connecting to the existing grid(this cost is usually buried and hidden in the spin ), and the transmission losses which are usually severe because the wind farm site can rarely be sited close to the load centre.
Back up is only available for all practical purposes from fossil fuel and nuclear. Pumped storage is very ineffective as backup for a wind drought. Batteries are hugely expensive.
Then we have the unresolved environmental issues.,… Noise, visual pollution and bird strikes.
And for what gain to the environment for this huge investment????
A little late to the party; had internet issues.
The simple fact is, the cost to install and operate wind turbine generators (WTG) in the US has decreased by two-thirds in the past 7 years. What is now profitable at 4.3 cents per kWh sold (total including Federal production tax credit subsidy of 2.3 cents) cost almost three times that much just 7 years ago.
That cost reduction is absolutely due to federal subsidies. The subsidies did what they were supposed to do: allow WTG designers and installers to test and refine their designs to reduce installed costs, increase annual capacity factors, and reduce operating costs. They did exactly that.
The NREL article shows what is still to come.
A bit of wind energy history seems appropriate, for those who keep bashing the technology. Some of this is from the Dept of Energy, with much of my own wording. It is now 37 years since California’s Altamont Pass had the first WTGs installed, (1980). To borrow a phrase, We’ve come a long way, baby.
Why do we have wind energy subsidies and grants in the US? The short answer is, the US government got tired of having to import energy and at one point the experts told government we were running out of natural gas. Government looked to renewable energy as part of the answer, and decreed some federal assistance to investigate the possibilities. The gas industry took that as a challenge and proceeded to drill in novel ways and find huge amounts of natural gas. Gas became cheap, and wind energy could not yet compete, so government extended the subsidies to plants that start by 2019. By then, onshore wind turbine generators should compete without assistance.
Some of these events are described briefly by the DoE at this link.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/history-us-wind-energy
1973 – Arab oil embargo increased gasoline prices and created long lines at gas stations; Again in 1979 with Iranian revolution. America decides to act, to reduce our energy consumption across all sectors.
1977 President Carter’s famous sweater speech; he tells the nation we are running out of energy (including natural gas) and all must conserve. Public fountains across the US go dry as pumps are switched off. Cities and towns across the US have no Christmas lights that year.
1978 President Carter signed PURPA, the Public Utilities Regulatory Act, which made utilities purchase electricity from small renewable plants, including wind. Industries across the country built their own cogeneration plants over the next decade to supply electricity and steam to the processes.
1979 – March 28: Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdown in Pennsylvania brings nuclear construction to a halt due to serious safety concerns. Plants in progress were finished, but almost zero were started after that.
1980 – First large wind farm was built at Altamont Pass, California – bad design, too many perches for birds, developers discover the wind in California is weak at only 26 percent annual capacity factor.
1981 – NASA scientists develop Viterna Method for wind blade calculations. This is the breakthrough that was lacking to design wind turbine blades with great efficiency.
1988 10 MW lead-acid battery for grid storage installed in Chino, California
1990s – faster computers allow better calculations. Wind blade calculations are long and complicated, so that fast computers are required to give optimal solutions.
1992 – President George H.W. Bush signed The Energy Policy Act, which authorizes a production tax credit of 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour of wind-power-generated electricity and re-establishes a focus on renewable energy use. The PTC increases over time with inflation. Presently is at 2.3 cents per kWh. Note that a renewable owner could choose a one-time, 30 percent investment tax credit, but not both that and the PTC.
1993 DoE builds the National Wind Technology Center to test wind systems
1996 5 MW lead-acid battery for grid-scale storage installed at Vernon, California
2008 The U.S. Department of Energy publishes their 20% Wind Energy by 2030 report
2008 US installed wind capacity reaches 25.4 GW.
2008 US wind energy production exceeded 1 percent of all electricity for the first time. Wind was 1.34 percent of all electricity sold in the US that year. Wind output jumped 62 percent over the previous year.
2009 Wind purchase power agreements (PPA) peaked at $70 per MWh, excluding tax credits.
2011 The U.S. Department of Energy releases the National Offshore Wind Strategy in partnership with the Department of the Interior to reduce the cost of energy through technology development and reducing deployment timelines. In the following year, three offshore wind demonstration projects are chosen as a part of this $168 million initiative.
2012 US installed wind capacity reaches 60 GW. Annual wind-based electricity produced was barely under 3 percent (2.93) of all US electricity sold. The wind output had more than doubled in just 4 years. The annual growth rate was astounding, at 27 percent per year. Much of the new capacity is in the fabulous wind in the Great Plains region of the US, from Canada to Texas and Colorado to Missouri. Much of that area has annual capacity factors of 40 percent.
2013 First Grid-Connected Offshore Wind Turbine in the U.S., a small, 20 kW unit offshore Maine, with Dept of Energy funding. A storage battery on California’s Santa Catalina Island was installed, at 1 MW and 7 hours capacity. (This was to allow the diesel generators to run constantly rather than cycle on and off, which created more air pollution).
2014 8 MW, 4 hours, grid-scale battery for wind energy storage installed at Tehachapi, California
2015 The Wind Vision Report is released showing that 35% wind energy is possible by
2050. Installed wind capacity reaches nearly 74 GW, while electricity produced was 4.68 percent of the US annual total. Grid-scale batteries for storing electricity are installed in California.
2015 Wind technology improved dramatically, with onshore projects in the Great Plains region profitable with only 4.3 cents per kWh (total) sold. PPAs reached a low of 2 cents per kWh sold. Installation costs fell to $1600 per kW nameplate capacity. Annual capacity factors in the best locations exceed 40 percent.
2016 First grid-scale offshore wind farm starts operation offshore Rhode Island, the Block Island project with 30 MW using 5 turbines of 6 MW each. Production tax credit is reduced over several years and ends completely in 5 years.
2017 Total installed wind capacity reaches 84,000 GW. In early 2017, wind energy exceeded 8 percent of all US electricity sold on a monthly basis. EIA numbers show that wind energy output was as much as hydroelectric power output.
2017 Oklahoma announces approval and financing for a 2,000 MW wind energy farm in the panhandle region, having 800 turbines at 2.5 MW each.
2017 70 MW total of grid-scale batteries, all 10 MW or larger, operating in Southern California. The two largest are 30 MW each.
2017 Contracts are signed for a 100 MW, 85 MW and a 50 MW battery systems, for Long Beach and Los Angeles, respectively. Storage is 4 hours for the 100 MW battery. The batteries can be charged at night with wind energy, or during the day with solar energy. Discharge is expected during evening peak loads, thus allowing expensive peaker power plants to remain shut down.
Sorry for all your wind farm statistics and subsidies, etc. But I’ll stick with my former quote:
“You could probably cut it more than half if you just did away with it…just sayin…”
– JPP
When I read this article, I was going to make that comment. the best way is to simply not build windfarms (or more correctly subsidy farms).
“Roger Sowell August 24, 2017 at 7:08 pm
2017 70 MW total of grid-scale batteries, all 10 MW or larger, operating in Southern California. The two largest are 30 MW each.”
Depending what they are made of, I have seen NiCad/Lio batteries go bang and burn in radio controlled toys. nd, IIRC, Lio batteries on an aircraft burnt too. Can’t wait to see this happen grid scale.
Apples and oranges. Grid-scale batteries are heavily regulated in their design, construction, and operation. They have been working just fine for many years, as I wrote in another comment.
Ah yes, the old, anything that’s regulated by government can’t break line of thinking.
LP batteries wear out before they can store and release the energy equivalent of what it costs to build them.
it is cheaper to buy the total electricity the battery can handle in its lifetime from a coal plant, than it is to build the battery.
MarkW
“Ah yes, the old, anything that’s regulated by government can’t break line of thinking.”
Yep just like the building that burnt down in England, 100% government owned and run. Who’s in jail for that one, you guessed it, no one! If it had been a privately owned building there would be people in jail and about 10,000 new regulations and or agencies created by now.
Grid scale batteries typically operate at very low rates of capacity utilisation, and are certainly pretty useless as energy stores, with capacities typically measured in minutes at full output. Their role is mainly to replace some of the grid inertia that is absent when wind generation is significant.
«The simple fact is, the cost to install and operate wind turbine generators (WTG) in the US has decreased by two-thirds in the past 7 years». Say to American Wind Energy Association (AWEA; source: Department of Energy):
http://www.awea.org/Resources/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=5547
http://awea.files.cms-plus.com/images/WindVision.PNG
Good Lord Sowell,
You lie like a rug…
Roger
Why is it that every other innovation in the world seems to be able to be funded privately, but only Green dreams have to be funded publicly. If you believe in wind power put all your money were your mouth is and get a bunch of like minded people together and take the risk. There are plenty of Billionaires out there that would be more than willing to give up the money.
This is your dream not mine why should the hours I work go to support your dream? I am not your slave.
Every other innovation is NOT funded privately. The US spends billions each year funding research of all kinds. The idea is, in the US, that it is a bad idea for only wealthy individuals, or wealthy companies, to do the research and innovating. It’s a kind of egalitarian thing.
Therefore, the government has more than a dozen national research laboratories. Government funding also goes to research universities with smart professors and eager graduate students. Government funding also goes to promising private entities that compete with their proposals for the funding.
It’s an eye-opener to browse through NASA’s patents that are available for licensing. All created by government-funded research.
It really is fascinating how some people actually believe that government subsidies actually make everyone richer.
Plus the belief that anything that is done by government can’t be done by the private sector.
Roger
What is really eye popping is how much money the government waists all kind of ridiculous projects just to make people like you happy. If that money was left in the private market it would actually accomplish something. You can’t justify the need for windmills without the manufactured BS of CAGW, since there is no C in AGW, and in fact it’s more likely there is a B (as in beneficial) AGW (BAGW remember you saw it here first), there is no compelling public interest to further subsidies these projects. However there also is no reason people like you can’t put their own money to risk, since you are the ones who believe in this, do it and stop trying to use your political cronies power to steal the money that I need to feed my family for your boondoggles! By the way if it does work and you get rich you can laugh your way to the bank, my guess though is that your conviction stop at your wallet.
MarkW
Since you are a like minded very intelligent person who clear understands how screwed up the world is I give you full license to use BAGW anytime you like.
If the government ran silicon valley, a computer would be as big as a house and cost even more. And we would all hear what a great investment our tax dollars were providing.
Take the money spent trying to pick winners and losers and spend it on winners. Pretty quickly the average Joe will end up the winner..
When you pay people to lose, pretty soon you end up with a nation of losers.
If we paid a million dollars to every person with only 1 leg, within a single generation half the people in the country would have only 1 leg. We need to stop rewarding things we don’t want, as heartless as it might seem, because in the end it only makes things worse.
Ferd
“We need to stop rewarding things we don’t want, as heartless as it might seem”
Yep, invariably the few people that are helped by government action that we hear so much about are greatly out number by those the government screws and or destroys along the way and more often than not the “helped” are handicapped for life by the help they received.
Roger
I need to ask are you BAGW denier?
Come on mods let the last one through its good!
For MarkW, re
“It really is fascinating how some people actually believe that government subsidies actually make everyone richer.”
Well, then, with that attitude, please never drive on any Interstate highway again. Nor can you drive on state highways that were financed in part by Federal funds.
Stay completely out of every car, because the crash and other safety testing was conducted using federal money – at least in part.
Never, ever, use any products that derived from any of the research that NASA did. You are back to wearing only cotton or wool or leather clothes.
You also cannot ever use the internet again, as that was indeed developed by a bunch of guys on the federal payroll.
Also, you must reduce your electricity consumption by whatever amount the federally-built hydroelectric dams contribute in your area.
If you attended a public school at any time, or a private school with any sort of federal support to that school, please erase from your mind anything you might have learned there.
Then, stop buying anything at all from business that received money as Small Business Association loans, also from any that are run or employ military veterans that went to college on the GI Bill.
Subsidies? They are everywhere. Is society better off for having them?
You obviously say No. Good for you.
An NREL article shows you that Crescent Dunes is up and running – correctly, but it showed the same thing when it was shut down for 8 months because of salt leaks. I am sorry, but NREL is not a reliable source, just like this report shows.
So Roger – when will wind power be too cheap to meter?
Never. I never claimed it would be.
Driving past Lawrence Livermore or Berkeley in California, you can drive for a whole hour looking at hillsides covered in wind turbine designs going all the way back to the 50’s.
If there was a way to make wind power economical, it would have been found by now. There isn’t.
However technology for falsifying green economics has advanced spectacularly.
Roger
Thanks for the list.
A few weeks ago I looked into the storage of power and read the entire list of projects/installations ever built to see what is there. It is small, expensive, and not costed into the wind turbine cost. I think that is misleading.
The concern I have about the numbers is exemplified by your 2015 note:
“2015 Wind technology improved dramatically, with onshore projects in the Great Plains region profitable with only 4.3 cents per kWh (total) sold. PPAs reached a low of 2 cents per kWh sold. Installation costs fell to $1600 per kW nameplate capacity. Annual capacity factors in the best locations exceed 40 percent. ”
There is more to this deal than meets the eye in that paragraph. First, the wind power producer is only occasionally >40% and it is given priority – i.e. a guarantee that if it is available it will be purchased. Without that, they rapidly become stranded assets.
Consider what is happening in South Africa right now, where the buyer, Eskom, is not concerned about ‘boosting renewables’ over any other source. Power is power and they don’t care where it comes from. They have large generating capacity (like coal and gas fired plants in the US). Instead of the US and EU examples where the wind power is stranding coal-fired assets because of preference for the ‘renewable’ source, in South Africa they are saying, “Why should we take that power. Build it if you want, subsidise it if you want, but we are only prepared to pay for it what it will cost us to not produce. And they produce low cost power.
So the government subsidised, or gave guarantees in theory, to three very large renewable installations which are now coming on line. Eskom refused to buy the power unless it was at the levelized cost of their own sources (from coal almost entirely). So anyone can be an independent power producer (IPP) but the electricity gets no favours. If it is not baseline, or ‘balancing’ (like Ballito on the North Coast) it is not very beneficial. The reality is that unreliable sources of power are not worth very much, certainly not as much as dispatchable sources.
It is only legislation or more correctly, policy, that makes wind power equal in value to reliable power. Left to the free market, wind power is only worth the marginal cost of producing more from whatever competing generating system provides the baseline power. In South Africa, it means that Eskom has to pay for the capital cost of its equipment when not using it and taking the wind energy into the grid. Well, they are supposed to pay the wind guys 2 or 3 or 4 cents per KWH, whatever it is. They cannot make a profit buying for that price (grid parity) because they are left with massive temporarily stranded assets which they still have to pay for permanently. They are only interested in taking that power if they can raise the price of electricity to cover their capital investment shortfall. The government refuses to allow that, so they are refusing to take the power from the three big projects. Now it is the wind and solar producers who have permanently stranded assets. The shoe is on the other foot.
This will happen in the USA when the market is freed. At the moment, policy temporarily and disruptively strands the assets of coal and hydro and gas-fueled producers. When there is a free market, this same compromised group will quickly, temporarily, strand the assets of the wind turbine owners and they will have to up the price to remain in business, praying for wind. Eskom will only take the power when it suits them because it is unreliable. Why should they strand their own investment?
If the distributor is independent of the generating sources, who has real power? The baseline producers or the intermittents? Obviously the reliable ones.
Putting batteries into the system changes the equation. Wind plus massive storage can replicate a baseline producer. No problem, but the total cost is what it is, and until it matches the reliability, it is not a baseline producer. When it is, it will compete as the other do (in a free market).
The storage systems in (especially) California are not built and owned by the wind turbine companies – they have passed that (large) cost onto the grid owners, so there is the pretense that wind might be reliable and inexpensive. The best that can happen for them is a miracle breakthrough in large scale super-capacitors at a low enough cost to turn wind into a baseline source of power. That could happen, but is not on the horizon yet. To put a scale on it, Denmark needs about 4 TWH of storage to remove the supporting baseline generating stations. There is no technology on the horizon that can accomplish that. Maybe it will come.
Finally, even when it does, there is so much embedded energy in a wind turbine that it is not a practical net source of power. I don’t think they can overcome that fundamental. Turbines just don’t last long enough to give back the necessary 9-fold return on energy invested in them and their storage to render them viable in a modern society.
No. The annual average capacity factor in the Great Plains region is 40 percent. Western Oklahoma is one of those places.
RS – You give battery capacity in MW. Is that a typo or do you actually not know the difference between power, MW, and energy, MWhr?
Storage systems are rated on their capacity of output (MW) and their storage capacity (MWH). The description is incomplete with only one of those two metrics. The largest ones on both counts I could locate are in California. Perhaps the new Musk Monster in Australia will be larger.
From what I have seen on the ‘Musk Monster’, divide its capacity by the demand and it will maintain for about 4 hours if fully charged at the start.
Dan Pangburn, I’m a complete idiot, of course. What the heck is a MW? What is power? What is energy? What is a MWhr? Is that different than a MWh?
The battery capacities are in MW, as listed by manufacturers and the Dept of Energy website for energy storage. Energy….. there’s that word again. Want to know what that means? In batteries, we measure than in kWh or sometimes MWh for the bigger ones.
Ya takes your MW of capacity, and see how many hours that thing takes to discharge at that MW. Multiply whatever you get by the MW, and ya has MWh. See how simple that is????
Seriously, Pangburn???? Have you read ANYthing at all of my blog? I have 40 years experience as a consulting chemical engineer, world-wide. My clients paid good money to listen to and read my opinions on their operations. They never once had to question if I understand basics like power, energy. Have a look at the Hywind article on WUWT, or my blog, for a very brief bio-sketch.
Just…no. The scenic Columbia Gorge, Union County valley, Baker County, scarred for life by these monsters. Dead, and dying birds thrown about like yesterday’s garbage, just…no.
At least with dams we have flood control and energy, let alone recreation. We just need to provide improved fish ladders and year round carp season with bounties.
Need to build more dams in CA with electricity producing turbines…- for water and affordable electricity.
In CA, hydro is not a renewable power. It would not make electricity more affordable; it would only create more subsidies for subsidy harvesters.
I may have missed something here, but it appears (from the 4 bullet points) that the way to decrease the cost of wind energy production is to spend a lot of money regulating, modeling and transmitting wind energy production.
This paper, like many academic ecological works, can be reduced to a sixteen word abstract:
“If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.”
“New Lab Report: How to Cut the Cost of Wind Energy in Half”
Build coal/gas fired power station. Simples!
Didn’t notice any mention of what they will do with all the birds and bats that they will be ‘harvesting’ so efficiently with their wonder windmills.
James Bull
It is physically impossible to extract more than 53% of the kinetic energy of the air by a wind turbine so the room for improvement is strictly limited. This is because enough kinetic energy must remain for the air to get out of the way after passing through.
A hydro turbine can extract 90+ % but that is because water is (almost) incompressible and you can keep up mass flow by simply increasing the cross-section of the tunnel.
The number for horizontal turbines is lower than for vertical axis turbines.
A hydro turbine can be increased in extraction efficiency by adding a draft tube about 60% of the vertical fall, up to a limit dictated by the negative pressure = cavitation. By the 1880’s this was standard practice. The same applies to a wind turbine but they are not really practical. Basically, the air behind is entrapped in a cylinder (of larger diameter) that uses inertia to pull a bit on the impeller/blades. I think it is possible to extract 57% of the energy from a wind stream. It probably varies with altitude.
As for “supercomputers” calculating the flow field in a large wind park in real time, let me point out that we still can’t even exactly calculate the flow field around an airframe, a vastly simpler undertaking, much less do it in real time. After putting any number of billions into CFD we can sort of do it for simple stationary or near stationary cases, which is the reason we use wind-tunnels a lot less nowadays. But we still build prototype aircraft, and we still spend lots of time doing envelope opening slowly and carefully. And we still get nasty surprises now and then.
Basically all that is needed is a general solution for Navier-Stokes’ equations. Incidentally we can then also do what the modellers claim to do today, i e build climate models strictly from physical theory. Unfortunately as yet nobody has even been able to show that a general solution exists.
I know of no other industry where we are continually fed with claims that “it is cheaper to produce than rival products”.
Do we ever hear proponents of Ford cars, for instance, keep telling us that they are cheaper to make than Nissans?
In the end the market place will decide. If wind really is cheaper and can compete without subsidies and preferential access to markets, then economics will take its course.
Paul
You mean “it’s cheaper than other products that’s why we have to subsidies it”!
It’s competitive, but we have to subsidize it. Got it
Interesting. My post has disappeared?
censorship at WUWT
More likely that WordPress lost it (in which case you’ll have to retype it if you didn’t save a copy), or it wound up in the spam pool where a moderator will free it.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/09/the-footprint-of-energy-land-use-of-u-s-electricity-production/comment-page-1/#comment-2577314
[excerpt]
The Capacity Factor reflects the ridiculous fact that non-dispatchable wind power is legislated into the grid ahead of much cheaper and fully dispatchable conventional power. This is the BIG FIX that our idiot politicians have enacted to make wind power LESS UNeconomic.
We pay the wind power companies 20 cents/KWh 24/7 for their output, and when there is too much wind power we give it away for free to neighbouring provinces and states. We also idle much cheaper gas-fired power costing 2-4 cents/KWh to make room for the much more costly wind power. It takes a politician to be that stupid (or corrupt).
However, the true factor that reflects the intermittency of wind power Is the Substitution Capacity*, which is about 5% in Germany today. This is the amount of dispatchable (conventional) power you can permanently retire when you add more wind power to the grid. In Germany they have to add 20 units of wind power to replace 1 unit of dispatchable power – ja, that’ll work!
Regards, Allan
*See E.On Netz excellent Wind Report 2005 at
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
Excerpt:
In 2004 two major German studies investigated
the size of contribution that wind farms make
towards guaranteed capacity. Both studies
separately came to virtually identical conclusions,
that wind energy currently contributes to the
secure production capacity of the system, by
providing 8% of its installed capacity.
As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability
of the wind farms determines the reliability
of the system as a whole to an ever increasing
extent. Consequently the greater reliability of
traditional power stations becomes increasingly
eclipsed.
As a result, the relative contribution of wind
power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply
system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously
to around 4% (FIGURE 7).
***************************
How to cut the cost off wind energy in half.
Use half as many turbines?
Why was NREL, née SERI, established? Is that mission still relevant? Or has the mission crept and grown to become a perpetually self-sustaining tax dependent entity?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vps-hJxNCjU&w=448&h=365%5D
On a related note, is there anything in Iowa that’s self-sustaining? Anything at all? Other than casseroles I can’t think of a single thing.
Lastly, shouldn’t wind turbines themselves be defined as pollutants contributing to visibility degradation? They certainly are in my book.
How to make wind power economical?
Go and live on Jupiter.
The only way to cut the cost of wind energy in half is to build only 50%.
There are other problems with windmills. The construction requires many cubic yards of concrete, construction of access roads and the transportation of towers and blades that tie up traffic. My question is, who is going to pay for the removal the windmills and remediation of the sites after they are obsolete. Additionally, I don’t think those huge fiberglass blades are recyclable.
Aye that’s the rub:
http://www.energycentral.com/news/retiring-worn-out-wind-turbines-could-cost-billions-nobody-has?utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=DAILY_NEWS_TRIAL&utm_source=2017_02_22
Retiring Worn-Out Wind Turbines Could Cost Billions that Nobody Has
Not currently competitive then. A lede buried in mandates, credits and “the future.” Or “More Cost Savings You Won’t Ever See in Your Power Bill or Taxes Because Base Load and Storage.”
Could, may, perhaps, possibly, if, potentially, maybe…. what a sales pitch.
New Lab Report: How to cut the birds in half
Attack to Eagles (A2e): Exterminating the Birds of Tomorrow
An unintended consequence of solar-thermal is that the focused intense radiation incinerates birds, etc. The locals call them ‘smokers’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICLXQN_lURk&feature=youtu.be
H/T Jo Nova.
Streamers.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/18/a-birds-eye-view-of-the-bird-scorching-ivanpah-solar-power-plant/
I will be extremely interested in seeing how the simulations mange to derive the optimal configuration in a wind project where the wind can come from a wide range of angles.
This photo shows a really bad configuration one day:
http://wermenh.com/wind/images/vattenfall-image_300.jpg
It’s not clear to me how changing the orientation of the rotors will result in a significant gain. To shift the turbulent flow to miss the next turbine downstream may result in just as large a loss in the upstream turbine.