August 12, 2017
tags: wind power
By Paul Homewood
We see many glowing articles about wind power, and renewable lobbyists, such as Renewable UK, are often given undue space in the media to peddle mistruths.
This article is designed to lay out some of the basic facts. It will naturally concentrate mainly on the UK, but I believe it will have relevance elsewhere too.
Renewable lobbyists like to emphasise how “clean” wind power is, and how many tonnes of CO2 are saved.
Others will argue that wind farms are a long way from being environmentally friendly, and arguably save little CO2 anyway.
I am not going to get into these debates, as they are subjective, and therefore not relevant to an objective analysis.
Capacity and Outputs
So, first to some basic facts.
Last year in the UK, according to government statistics, wind power generated 37.4 TWh, 11% of the UK’s total electricity.
Of this, onshore produced 21.0 TWh, and offshore 16.4 TWh.
Wind power capacity was 16.2GW at the end of 2016, and average utilisation was 28%.
To put these figures into perspective, the CCGT plant at Pembroke, built in 2012, is rated at 2000 MW, and is capable of producing about 15 TWh a year. In other words, two Pembrokes could replace most of the wind power capacity in the UK.
Subsidies
There are basically three subsidy mechanisms for wind power in Britain:
- Feed in Tariffs – designed for small scale operations
- Renewables Obligation (RO)– this has been the main form of subsidy so far. The scheme places an obligation on UK electricity suppliers to source an increasing proportion of the electricity they supply from renewable sources, or effectively pay for certificates instead.
The scheme is now closed to all new generating capacity
- Contracts for Difference (CfDs) – These are awarded to renewable projects via an auction process. Successful applicants receive a guaranteed Strike Price for the period of the contract (usually 15 years). This guaranteed price is inflation linked each year.
Whilst the renewable operator directly receives the market price for electricity produced, the government guarantees to top it up to the Strike Price. If the market price is greater, the reverse happens.
CfDs are only available to renewable projects, although a similar structure is agreed for Hinkley Point.
In terms of numbers, ROCs are valued at about £46/MWh, roughly the same as the current wholesale price of electricity.
Different types of renewable generators receive different allowances. For instance, while onshore wind farms have been receiving 1 ROC per MWh, offshore wind ones receive 2 ROC.
Put simply, an onshore wind farm will expect to earn double the wholesale price, and an offshore will triple it.
CfD prices so far agreed for offshore wind range from £123.47 to 161.71/MWh, making them an even dearer option than ROCs.
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the cost of subsidising renewable power this year will amount to £6.0bn. Of this, the Committee on Climate Change estimate that £3.1bn will go to wind farms.
By 2021, subsidies for wind will have increased to £7.1bn, as capacity grows. This equates to £265 per household.
The renewable industry loves to publish surveys showing how much the public like wind power. I suspect their results would be very different if the public were told just how much they are having to pay for it!
Preferential Access to Markets
As well as the actual subsidies paid out, wind farms receive another huge commercial advantage by being given what amounts to preferential access to the electricity market.
Put simply, they are pretty much guaranteed being able to sell all the power they produce, and, in the case of CfDs, at a guaranteed price as well. Anyone running a business will tell you that just how much this would be worth to them.
This preferential access works in two ways:
1) The RO system places an obligation on UK electricity suppliers to source an increasing proportion of the electricity they supply from renewable sources.
2) As wind farms only receive ROCs or the CfD guaranteed price if they actually supply power, they can afford to sell electricity at rock bottom prices, effectively undercutting other suppliers.
The CfD mechanism is particularly damaging to market forces in this respect. In theory, there is nothing to stop a wind farm selling at a penny per MWh, as it knows it will still get the guaranteed price anyway.
There is no way that conventional producers can compete at this level.
Without this ability to sell all of the power they produce, it is doubtful whether wind farms would be economically viable, even with subsidies.
Constraint Payments
If all of this was not bad enough, wind farms even get paid when they don’t produce, as Dr John Constable describes:
There are currently about 750 wind farms north of the border, with roughly 3,000 wind turbines. Their total generating capacity amounts to 5,700 MW. The actual amount produced varies according to the weather. But at its maximum, that wind capacity is more than the 5.5 GW peak demand on the Scottish grid.
What this means, of course, is that the output from Scottish wind turbines is often more than the Scottish system can absorb. That requires the surplus energy to be exported to England and Wales. But that isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The wind farms are distributed across Scotland, sometimes in very remote regions, so there is a real problem in getting their energy down to the English border – let alone getting it across. For some years now, Scotland’s total export capacity has been only 3.5 GW, well under the peak output of the wind farm fleet.
So, reinforcements and new links are being introduced. These range from the hugely controversial, and to many environmentally unacceptable, £820 million Beauly-Denny upgrade, to the massive Western Link, a subsea connector from Hunterston to Deeside that is set to come online this year at a cost of more than £1 billion – and will entail a standing charge on energy bills across Britain of about £100 million a year for 35 years.
Yet in spite of the cost, these upgrades cannot completely address the problem: there is still more wind power in Scotland than can be reasonably and affordably absorbed into the system, or exported to its neighbours, partly because the wind fleet keeps growing.
But a careless government and a lucrative subsidy system doesn’t explain the full flourishing of Scotland’s wind industry. Bizarre as it may seem, the fact that the Scottish grid cannot physically absorb all this wind power is also an attraction – because subsidised wind farms can actually earn more per unit generated when that unit is thrown away than when it is sold to consumers. In other words, they really do get paid more for not making sausages than they do when selling normally.
The explanation is simple. A wind farm receives roughly half of its income from the wholesale price and half from subsidy, the infamous Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC). When the grid is either at or close to capacity, National Grid stops the wind farm from generating, in order to prevent damage to the overhead wires and, at worst, a major system disruption.
When this happens, the wind farm will keep its wholesale income – which is fair enough, since it was contracted in to the system. But it loses its ROCs, because those are only issued for electricity actually sold to consumers.
What happens then, however, is that the wind farm will ask for compensation for the lost ROCs. The euphemism for “being paid for not producing sausages” is “constraint payment”. And often – and this is the crucial point – they will ask for more compensation than they are losing in income.
For National Grid, this is just a pass-through cost, so they don’t care much about it – they simply increase the amount they’re charging consumers. But for consumers, it’s a truly terrible deal. Since 2010, we’ve paid £328m to wind farms not to generate – mostly to onshore Scottish wind farms, though England’s offshore farms have also started to get into the act. Last year, the total was £82m. This year, it’s already reached £50m.
https://capx.co/the-scottish-wind-power-racket/
Intermittency
It goes without saying that wind power is extremely intermittent.
To cater for periods when there is little or no wind power, the government has contracted for standby capacity, via the Capacity Market mechanism.
Currently contracts are arranged for up to 2020/21. For that year, the auction price ended at £22.50/KW of capacity, meaning a total cost for that year of £1.2bn. As with the subsidies, this cost is passed on to electricity users.
As more renewable capacity is added in future years, this cost will only rise.
More problematically, nearly all of the current standby capacity contracted consists of existing generation, including coal and nuclear. As these begin to shut down, they will need to be replaced by new generation, which will certainly require a much higher price in order to be viable.
We are all familiar with the variability of wind power from one week to the next.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
But it can also vary considerably on a day to day, and even hour to hour.
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
This creates big problems for the grid, which mainly has to resort to bringing on readily dispatchable power, normally from gas generators.
Again, as wind power capacity is ramped up, this problem will feature more and more.
One further issue is that of inertia. Without going into technical detail, system inertia, as provided by conventional plants, such as coal, gas and hydro, is vital for the grid to cope with constant changes in demand and supply.
Currently the grid can cope with the small amounts of wind power on the system, but as more wind capacity is added the problem of inertia will become greater.
(There is an excellent explanation of system inertia here.)
Transmission
As referred to by Dr Constable, in the section above, the rapid growth of wind power has required considerable expenditure on upgrading/building transmission lines.
This has proved particularly expensive and controversial in Scotland, where large amounts of wind capacity have been built in remote, mountainous areas.
It is difficult to get figures from the National Grid or government as to just how much this is costing. Some estimates have put the cost as high as £40 billion eventually.
What is certain though is the enormous environmental effect that these lines are having on the countryside.
Costs
There are frequent claims from the wind industry that they will soon be cost competitive against conventional sources.
Whether they are right or not, however, totally misses the point because they are not comparing like with like. Wind cannot supply reliable, dispatchable power, and therefore is intrinsically worth less.
The US EIA recognizes this fact, and recommends using what is known as Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy (LACE) for comparing different technologies. They explain:
The US Energy Information Administration has recommended that levelized costs of non-dispatchable sources such as wind or solar may be better compared to the avoided energy cost rather than to the LCOE of dispatchable sources such as fossil fuels or geothermal. This is because introduction of fluctuating power sources may or may not avoid capital and maintenance costs of backup dispatchable sources. Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy (LACE) is the avoided costs from other sources divided by the annual yearly output of the non-dispatchable source. However, the avoided cost is much harder to calculate accurately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Avoided_cost
Put simply, the total cost of a renewable source, such as wind power, must be compared with the marginal cost of the dispatchable source, say gas. The latter would be essentially fuel plus a few other variable costs.
Latest government figures suggest that the marginal cost of CCGT would be about £40/MWh. The most optimistic costings that I have seen for onshore wind are over £70/MWh.
Fossil Fuel Subsidies
Whenever subsidies for wind power are mentioned, somebody from the renewable lobby usually pops up to claim that fossil fuels are also subsidised.
Many countries provide consumer subsidies for energy, purely because affordable energy is important for their people. Because most energy is derived from fossil fuels, this is then interpreted as “subsidy for fossil fuels”.
This of course is nonsense. The subsidies I have discussed are producer subsidies, ie payments are made to wind power producers.
While such subsidies may be paid to fossil fuel industries in other countries, I have always taken the view that is their decision, and we have no right to tell them what and what not to do.
As far as the UK is concerned, oil and gas companies, or power companies using fossil fuels, receive no subsidies, to the best of my knowledge.
On the contrary, over the years the UK Government has received tens of billions of pounds in revenue from oil and gas production, over and above ordinary corporation tax which all companies pay.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/government-revenues-from-uk-oil-and-gas-production—2
Global Wind Output
I have concentrated on the UK, but let me finish with a couple of statistics for worldwide wind power, from the BP Energy Review.
- At 959 TWh, wind power accounted for 3.9% of world electricity generation last year.
- In terms of overall energy consumption, the share of wind was 1.6%.
Every year we hear how wind power is going up by leaps and bounds. It is wise though to bear in mind just what a low base it is starting from.
SOURCES
1) Electricity statistics
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/electricity-statistics
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-section-6-renewables
2) Office for Budget Responsibility projections of subsidies
HT/Paul Homewood
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Wind turbines are strictly an 18th Century technology, and a bad one at that. The future of energy production is obviously molten salt reactors. China and India recognize that fact and will likely beat us to the market. As I recall, China, had been errecting windmills at a fast pace and was continually being cited (along with the usual nominee – Denmark) as an enlightened nation (China was actually most enthusiastic about nuclear power, not wind, which, as I recall was concentrated well away from the coast and larger population centers) . A few months ago, I recall that China issued a ban on any new windmills because they were disrupting their grid.
The fallacy that wind proponents (who seem to lie more than even global warmists) advanced were always “studies” that “proved” that a grid with 35% wind power would not be disrupted – the grid “could handle it.” Never mentioned were the actions and cost required for the grid to “accept 35% wind”.
“China issued a ban on any new windmills because they were disrupting their grid.”
….
That is not true, the reason they banned new projects in several provinces was due to waste, not grid disruption. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-02/23/content_28316786.htm
Wind turbines do disrupt grids. That big blackout in South Australia occurred because, as currently implemented to save up-front costs, wind farms cannot provide voltage support. The South Australian winds were driving the wind farms at rated capacity, but, as the grid voltage dropped to match the load currents with available power, the power that the wind farms could transmit to the grid fell by twice the voltage drop, as a first order approximation, by percentage. A ten percent drop in the voltage would reduce the transmitted by from nameplate to 80% of rated capacity, with the remaining 20% of power capacity accelerating the rotational velocity of the turbines. To prevent the turbines from self-destructing, despite the theoretical possibility of running at full rated power to keep the lights on, the wind farm operators were forced to feather the blades and stop generating any power.
Preventing that sort of instability forced shutdown requires the inclusion of an active source of voltage support in the grid link, but that would require a synchronous machine with either an attached flywheel or having a lot of rotational inertia in its own mass, that is spun up by the grid as a motor and then excited as a synchronous capacitance. As the grid became unstable, the machine would be spun down, but, for as long as it stayed above its minimum critical speed, the wind farm would be able to deliver all available power to the grid.
To save money, wind turbines dynamically connect the stator windings of an induction machine to keep the electrical frequency of the rotor in the power producing regime that best matches the mechanical speed of the turbine blades. The dynamic switching allows the generator, through a transformer, to be connected to the grid, but induction generators cannot provide voltage support.
Hi Arthur, I completely accept the premise that some advocates of Wind Energy are more than capable of lying and over stating their case, that said Balancing Grids and Storage of excess capacity are possibilities and Smart CHarging and Localised Grid network technology are all more than capable of ironing out technical difficulties. I do subscribe to the saying there are no problems only Solutions and Better questions lead to better answers.
I too convinced about the potentials of molten Salt )( Thorium) reactors but also believe that localised networks will in some areas see the benefits of other renewables meeting the demands on some cases.
China is a Command and Control economy, I do not wish to see that in the west, The Washington Consensus under Debt Based Fiat money and financialised Capitalism is pretty much Stalinist now as well though with this is mind I am very keen to see all new energy solutions particularly those that do not barriers to entry are developed to their fullest potential including WIND.
My view is that we can not afford to ignore any energy solutions which are viable in terms of becoming Breeder sources of Energy without externalities. Hinkley Point in the UK is a very silly idea and very last century too.
FLow cell Technology and new Battery Technology are all making leaps and bounds in progress, there is a lot of good stuff happening in the Energy Business and I do not mean Fracking and Tar Sands both of which I think are doing more harm than good.
Without externalities? Really, maybe you should look at these a little closer i think you would find just a few externalities that you may have missed, like pollution during production, pollution during decommissioning, Noise pollution, wildlife destruction, damage from outages and many more. That being said, arbitrary use of an inefficient means of generation with its added cost is an externality in itself affecting the least capable in society of deal with the cost. Externalities caused by government intervention on the market for arbitrary reason is the most difficult of externality to overcome because the is no mechanism to effect change or recoup lose. You are creating a cost to effect a change for an imagined externality through the use of government power to oppress the most oppressable and the only actual effect you are having is to redistribute wealth to the most wealth sectors in our society from the least. Great job genius!
How about instead of reading a bunch of BS from a bunch of socialist disguising themselves as economist you actually think through the process.
It would really be good to see the EV townies put their money where their mouths were and only use electric vehicles; after all they tell us that EVs are so much better than any other vehicle. Consider having to evacuate Houston with all the cars electric and power outs and torrential rain and you have a 500 mile stop start drive. Not possible. The escape routes would be blocked with bricked EVs with no power
A drive from London to Edinburgh not possible without an overnight stay.
Describe a workable way for all the on-street parked cars to charge
Yes a townie with no real need for a car can virtue (and money) signal with flashy toys. But for anyone that needs to drive any distance in all weathers, EVs are extremely unlikely to ever be capable.
I don’t think so.
http://euanmearns.com/is-large-scale-energy-storage-dead/
http://euanmearns.com/the-renewables-future-a-summary-of-findings/
“Wind cannot supply reliable, dispatchable power, and therefore is intrinsically worth less.”
The question is how much less is it worth when it’s so unreliable thus-
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/august
or worse still-
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/june
The answer lies in all forms of energy generation facing the supreme guru’s CO2 tax to bring the earth’s temperature back to the level the supreme guru knows it should be (hold that thought mere mortals) and then the Regulator orders a level playing field for them all. Ipso facto no tenderer of electrons to the communal grid can tender any more than they can reasonably guarantee (ie short of unforseen mechanical breakdown) 24/7 all year round.
End of gaming the system for the unreliables and their dumping practices as they’d be forced to invest in storage to lift their average tender amounts and/or partner with thermal generators and pay them their just insurance premia they’ve been avoiding to date. Let that level playing field free market ascertain the true costs unreliables have been foisting on thermal generators and consumers alike. Spare me the Sylvester and Tweetie Pie incidental side story though.
Is wind power endorsed by Hot Air Balloon enthusiasts?
Have these wind power operators prepaid into a trust fund for removal at the end of the short life?
or will these operators conviently fold up leaving that mess to the tax payers
Are these costs in anyway included in this analysis?
Have these wind power operators prepaid into a trust fund for removal at the end of the short life?
or will these operators conviently fold up leaving that mess to the tax payers
Are these costs in anyway included in this analysis?
https://www.variablepitch.co.uk/settlement/
this site has a lot of data on the UK wind and other alternative energy generation sectors.
Calculating a sinking fund over a 20 or 25 year life period is easy enough.
With Both Batteries for storage and also other storage solutions such as Water reservoir/Gravity systems or Hydrogen production will allow for peak generation storage instead of load shedding for turbines.
Refurbishment and Circular economy techniques for re use and re purposing of plant are also factors, Re Gausing Magnets and SO forth are all doable especially if one adopts an energy based metric of measurement and not the flawed and artificial metrics of Internal rate of return and discounting based upon time value of money which are completely false metrics especially in a complementary technology smart network system where it is understood that energy generation decisions are simply not Mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested
This is a very interesting Paper, it makes for quite sobering reading for the Renewables Zealots but is not without its pluses for cornucopian arguments and distributed network enthusiasts.
https://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf
Abstract
The Energy Returned on Invested, EROI, has been evaluated for typical power plants representing wind
energy, photovoltaics, solar thermal, hydro, natural gas, biogas, coal and nuclear power. The strict exergy
concept with no ”primary energy weighting”, updated material databases, and updated technical procedures
make it possible to directly compare the overall efficiency of those power plants on a uniform mathematical
and physical basis. Pump storage systems, needed for solar and wind energy, have been included in the
EROI so that the efficiency can be compared with an ”unbuffered” scenario. The results show that nuclear,
hydro, coal, and natural gas power systems (in this order) are one order of magnitude more effective than
photovoltaics and wind power.
Keywords:
ERoEI, EROI, energy return on invested, energy intensity, energy payback time, life cycle assessment
Couple of years ago I did a full analysis of hourly wind output in Ontario.
https://ontariowindperformance.wordpress.com/
RE-posting – Moderator, my original post disappeared into the ether. 2nd time lucky?
_________________
Thank you Paul Homewood – an excellent article.
You have described a system to compensate wind power operators that is utterly insane – only a gang of corrupt/idiot politicians could dream up such madness.
You say “average utilisation was 28%”. Is this the same definition as Capacity Factor? It would appear so, equal to {total actual power output)/(total rated capacity assuming 100% utilization).
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 – utterly uneconomic and nonsensical!
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).
***************************
CCGT Plant….. didn’t know what that meant
This is an overview
https://www.gepower.com/resources/knowledge-base/combined-cycle-power-plant-how-it-works
@BobBoder, Whats sauce for the goose is sauce for the Gander so externalities need to be added on all analysis of all solutions. You miss the point regarding alternative energies not being mutually exclusive to other forms of Energy production. My case is we need all of these solutions to be pursued. The Monetary Metric is flawed, you must concede that Money is a variable the EROI paper I linked to makes the point.
All Economics is Political, your lapse into scorn and rudeness does nothing to advance an argument, beats me every time how anyone ever thinks rudeness bolsters their argument, Genius?
Roger;
You are a fraud, economics for the person raising his family is not politics, economics of a company trying to survive competition so it can make payroll is not politics, your BS about externalities is just another way for you to make up cost structures so you can justify doing what you think is right. For all your talk of externalities you are still just justifying re-distributing wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy and connected, you are a poser trying to baffle the gullible with a bunch of BS and at the same time trying to convince yourself that you are virtuous. You never noticed that at the end of every “externality” there is someone unconnected to process getting rich? I have seen an awful lot of people being made poor by responses to imaginary “externalities”.
Do me a favor if you believe so much in the BS you are spewing take your money and invest it, but leave the money that I earn and have to pay in taxes out so it can be put to a real and practical use other than making the likes of Al Gore rich.
Bob, Economics at a domestic level and economics at a societal and Government level are two quite different Questions.
Take these Money Quizzes and tell me how you get on.
I Made these interactive Quizzes based upon the Positive Money Quiz By David Faraday https://www.quiz-maker.com/QYMG3AR and the money creation Survey of MP´s https://www.quiz-maker.com/Q4FBT85
Also Bob, you only have to refute arguments with arguments, no number of insults of the person advancing arguments or counter arguments diminishes the arguments put forward. Arguments are defeated by evidence not insults.
Now Bob you have produced ample evidence for me to call you rude, your allegations are simply Ad hominem and speculative on your part, in short not a great marker of the confidence you have in your own case.
Bob,
“For all your talk of externalities you are still just justifying re-distributing wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy and connected….”
Spot On!
Roger
Societal and Governmental economics are born on the back of domestic economics.
Let me ask you, how much of your domestic economic fortune has you tied up in renewables. You seem all to ready to take my tax dollars and invest in renewables to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. If you believe so strongly in renewables invest all you want and reap the benefit from it. But for you to invent a bunch of “externality” cost to justify using the power of the government to force bad choice on everyone else is the height of hubris.
Good discussion on the “subsides” that wind requires. Advocates like Roger Sowell and whoever is supplying copy to “Griff” should try to justify the costs of wind, and why the bird-choppers are such a good alternative.
Notably, much of the system that supports wind is not direct payments to wind producers, although they exist, but the required purchase and environmental certificates programs.
Windmill Farm subsidies were costing the State of Oklahoma about $114 million per year with the payments expected to increase to over one billion dollars per year in the future, if things didn’t change.
This is a significant amount of Oklahoma’s GDP and caused Oklahoma legislators to reassess the situation after figuring out they didn’t have enough money in the budget to fund Oklahoma schools adequately, and they decided to pass a law stopping subsidies for any new Windmill Farms, thus saving billions of dollars in subsidy payment in the future.
Oklahoma legislators are now considering imposing business taxes on all Windmill Farms in Oklahoma and treating them just like any other business. If they survive financially fine, if not, fine.
Oklahoma will let the free market decide the future of Windmill Farms.
Let’s see how many new Windmill Farms go up in Oklahoma in the future, now that these subsidies have stopped.
RogerLewis
“This is a significant amount of Oklahoma’s GDP and caused Oklahoma legislators to reassess the situation after figuring out they didn’t have enough money in the budget to fund Oklahoma schools adequately, and they decided to pass a law stopping subsidies for any new Windmill Farms, thus saving billions of dollars in subsidy payment in the future.”
Is this externality figured in your calculations?
TA
sorry should been posted above, thanks for the info.
Bob, I am not an advocate of subsidising crony capitalists in any industry, whether it be energy production or Banking. Oaklahoma made the right decision , schools are way more important an investment in the future to trash for some political hobby horse.
The wider question about EROI in society is well set out in this paper.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/energy-policy_Lambert_et.al_2013.pdf
“There is evidence too that once payments
for energy rise above a certain threshold at the national level (e.g.
approximately 10 percent in the United States) that economic
recessions follow (Hamilton, 2009; Hall et al., 2009; Murphy et al.,
2011). Despite the best intentions of improving net energy balances
for a developing nation, the large-scale introduction of renewable
energy generation may have too low an EROI and may prove too
expensive to facilitate continued growth in developing economies”.
The Green Fascists are bonkers, I have argued that case in the UK Green Party for some time, I am not a member but a good friend is, I despise Al Gore too, now he is a fraud I think we could both probably agree on that.
Local Government are not able to create their own money supply ( the exception in the USA is the Bank of North Dakota, which as well as having an oil Boom/Bust has had a publicly owned Bank which has assisted that States economy hugely, Ellen Brown has written on that ,https://ellenbrown.com/2016/05/02/bank-of-north-dakota-soars-despite-oil-bust-a-blueprint-for-california/ )
I am a pragmatist of the Old School and think that all objective and Viable energy sources Paotential and current are needed to assist with the economic Development of people across the world according to their own local needs. Sadly US foreign Policy frustrates the wishes of ordinary people all over the world even where they are rich in primary energy sources.
This report will give you some idea of my own perspective regarding Debt and the Oil Business.
http://priceofoil.org/…/2011/01/DrillingIntoDebt.pdf
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/01/climate-debate-know-your-co2-pseudo.html
Wind power – the basic fact: nobody needs it and if it wasn’t for politics, nobody would have it. The end.
Proponents / defenders of wind/solar energy often cite the statistic that electricity bills are smaller in Germany than in USA. This is not really true and it ignores the fact that dwellings on average are 2.5 times bigger (floor space) in the US than in Germany.
It would be better to talk about the average price per year of electricity per m2 of floor space. This statistic gives the following values:
Germany: 16.96 US dollars
USA: 5.48 US dollars
Here are the raw data numbers.
In Germany the average electricity cost per residence per year is 1450 euros or 1696 US dollars.
Source:
https://tranio.com/germany/maintenance/
The average area of dwellings in Germany was
89.9 m2 in 2006.
Source:
https://www.bmwfw.gv.at/Wirtschaftspolitik/Wohnungspolitik/Documents/housing_statistics_in_the_european_union_2010.pdf
However since this was a decade ago we will generously assume that today the average is a round 100 m2.
Thus in Germany the annual electricity per m2 dwelling is 14.5 euro or 16.96 usd.
Meanwhile in the USA, the average cost per month for electricity per month it is on average 114.09 usd, or an annual 1369 usd.
Source:
https://smartasset.com/personal-finance/how-much-is-the-average-electric-bill
Dwellings are much larger in the US than in Germany or Europe as a whole. The average dwelling in the USA has floor area of 2687 square feet, or 249.6 m2.
Source:
https://www.fatherly.com/love-and-money/family-finance/average-size-houses-us/
Thus in the US the annual electricity price per m2 of dwelling is 5.48 usd.
Note finally that in Germany it is much more common for people to live in apartments within large multi-storey apartment blocks, than in the US. This is especially so in the formerly communist east Germany. According to the report below, at German reunification in 1992, the average dwelling floor areas were in west and east Germany was 82.7 and 64.5 m2, respectively.
Source:
http://countrystudies.us/germany/93.htm
In 1992 united Germany had approximately 34.5 million dwellings with 149 million rooms, for a total of 2.8 billion square meters of living space. Dwellings in the west were larger than those in the east. In 1992 dwellings in the old Länder had an average floor space of 82.7 square meters for an average of 35.1 square meters per person, compared with 64.5 square meters and an average of 29.0 square meters per person in the new Länder.
Apple is building a data center in Iowa, allegedly because of wind power in the state.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-appl-invest-1-3b-135601019.html
But how much of IA’s power actually comes from “renewables” and how much from fossil fuels?
Answer: Not much.
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=IA
Apple can pay for the “wind energy” and then use the powerlines that everyone else uses. They really aren’t concerned about using renewables, only pretending to. Virtue signalling.
35% of the electrical power generated in Iowa is by wind. However, through magical paperwork that energy is largely sold to Illinois consumers who pay a premium price for “green” energy. Apple will be able to buy wind energy on the same arrangement.
So though 35% of the energy generated in Iowa is by wind, a much smaller percentage of the energy consumed is wind energy.
Great article by Paul Homewood. But I guess I’m a full disclosure guy. Consumers/voters in the British Isles need to understand the basics of what they’re paying and how much of their money is subsidizing whom. If they understand that and reward the responsible government at the ballot box, then you have to assume that they understand the deal and deserve what they get. This is democracy at work, folks. The same goes for Germany and other places that elect to pay a premium for renewable energy.
Some people like to feel green, and that’s OK.
The article on inertia never got to the reason why inertia is important to a power grid. Put simply inertia is essential to frequency control. Mechanically the inertia is all of the rotating machinery on the grid both generation and synchronous loads. More inertia give operators more time to respond to load-generation imbalances.
Any system that generates DC and uses an inverter to connect to the grid has no inertia simply because the inverter simply follows the grid with no ability to exchange momentum for energy. Both wind, solar, home solar, and grid scale batteries use inverters.
In Australia, Dr Finkel, the Chief Scientist, published a report on levelised costs of electricity generation.
Wind A$92/MWhr (no backup), solar with 12 hours storage A$172/MWhr, combined cycle gas turbine $83/MWhr, open cycle gas turbine A$123/MWhr, Supercritical coal A$76/MWhr.
So add some backup gas or batteries to wind and you end up with costs around A$150/MWhr, not counting additional network costs to balance intermittent supplies.
Yet our politicians in Australia keep claiming that wind/solar are cheaper and electricity costs will fall as they announce even more wind/solar projects, despite the evidence that electricity costs have doubled over the past five years.
As in the UK, renewables not only get paid the wholesale price, currently around A$100/MWhr, they also get to sell certificates currently priced at about $80/MWhr that are factored into retail prices
Last week I went to a hoilday vacation in Denmark. Travelling there from Bavaria is over 1000 km. In Denmark along the North Sea shore I saw all wind turbines steadily and quickly turning, according to the strong wind there.
On the travel back to Bavaria during 14 hours I saw no single wind turbine turning in Germany – and there are lots of it, especially in Nortern and eastern Germany as well as in the Nothern Bavarian hills. Seem the wind was not allowed to pass the Danish border.
It was a spooky view, showing that a complete country will generate no Wind and at night even no Solar power at all.
Exactly my observation too! Both in the first week of August and last week for well over 2000 km. Quite an incredible sight and reminding me of a mausoleum over good intentions…
Thanks for an excellent summary of how the ‘environmental’ lobby have conned UK taxpayers into decades of higher energy bills and less reliable supplies. It should be out there in every available medium, and the “green is good” brigade (most of whom either haven’t a clue about the real cost of their unicorn schemes, or frankly don’t give a damn as long as it “saves the planet”) should be repeatedly challenged to defend the policies that shovel cash to their fatt-cat friends.
Very informative discussion thanks for all the links.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/08/renewableseroi-why-money-doesnt-cut-it.html
You claim to use facts, then make a guess at 2021 and attempt to “shame” the wind industry on that “projected” number.
You are a fraud.