Guest essay by Paul Driessen
Foreword:
An article I wrote several weeks ago had a couple of stupid math errors. This column attempts to correct them – and take readers on a journey to the futuristic world of 100 percent “clean, green, sustainable, renewable” wind energy. Since the assumptions always guide the analysis, this column lays mine out, crunches the numbers, and concludes that replacing the 2.85 terawatts of electricity generated worldwide in 2016 – while ensuring stored power for just 48 windless hours – would require:
14.4 million 1.8-MW turbines … 570 million acres (30% of the Lower 48 US states) … and 1.4 trillion Tesla 100-kWh lithium-ion battery packs!
Need stored electricity for seven windless days? 50 million turbines, the US-Canadian land mass, and 5 trillion battery packs should do it.
Disagree with this analysis? Wade in with your own. Let’s have a wide-open debate, before renewable energy activists and politicians lock us into an energy future that might be horrendous for humanity and planet. (Or might save us from calamitous climate change.)
It’s amazing, though hardly surprising, how quickly some used Hurricane Harvey’s devastation to claim that fossil fuel emissions are driving catastrophic climate change and weather. Their proffered solution, of course, is to replace those fuels with “clean, sustainable, renewable” energy.
I’ve criticized this supposed solution many times, on multiple grounds. Unfortunately, a hasty numerical calculation for a recent column was way off base, and readers properly chastised me for the error. I just blew it, using megawatts instead of megawatt-hours to derive the number of wind turbines … and amount of land … it would take to replace the world’s 2016 electricity entirely with wind energy.
My conclusion that it would require 830 million turbines and twice the land area of North America was thus off by embarrassing amounts. However, my reviewers offered many “correct” numbers.
Their turbine totals ranged from 2 million to 4, 10 and 12 million; their acreage figures from 0.5 to 40, 60 and even 247 per turbine. Total acreage for all the turbines ranged from the size of France or Texas – to half of North America. Energy scholar Cork Hayden graciously provided analytical aid.
Bottom line: Assumptions are key – about turbine size; number, location and extent of good wind sites; ability to actually erect turbines on those sites; wind turbine capacity factor, in average hours per day of electricity generation; duration and quality of wind power per year, especially as turbines proliferate into increasingly poor wind areas; and power generation needed to charge huge battery arrays to ensure reliable electricity during multiple windless days (2, 7, 14 or more) when turbines provide no power.
Another variable, of course, is the amount of electricity that is to be replaced by wind. In 2016, the world used 25 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electrical energy, generated by fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear power stations, with minor contributions from wood (biomass) and trivial amounts of wind and solar. Year-round average power generation was 2.85 million megawatts (MW) or 2.85 terawatts (TW) – compared to zero generation in 1881.
Electricity makes our industries, jobs, travel, communication, living standards, health and safety possible, and demand will certainly grow as more nations electrify, and more vehicles are battery-powered.
Here are my fundamental assumptions: Wind turbines replace 100% of today’s 2.85 TW global electricity generation, by some future date – as many activists and politicians insist we must (and can) do. Turbines are all 1.8-MW nameplate power. Average turbine capacity factor gradually falls from 33% to 16.5% as the best wind sites are utilized, and much poorer sites must be developed.
(In the USA many of the best wind sites are off the Washington-to-California and Maine-to-Georgia coastlines, and in the Great Lakes, where water depths and powerful local opposition would make it impossible to install many turbines. Onshore turbine size is limited by the size of blades that can be hauled by trucks on winding roads. The same situation would likely apply around most of the globe.)
Further assumptions: One-third of turbine output powers society; two-thirds charge batteries that provide power for 48 of every 72 hours that wind is not blowing. And winds always cooperate with that scheme – always arriving just in the nick of time, as batteries are depleted, and never disappearing for more than two days, even during sweltering summers or frigid winters when demand soars but winds disappear.
Of course, most of these assumptions exist only in the realm of fairies, pixie dust, green energy utopia and easy number crunching. They are meant to initiate important analyses and debates that climate alarmists, renewable energy proponents, legislators and policy makers have never conducted.
Using these assumptions, generating 25 billion megawatt-hours would require 1.6 million 1.8-MW turbines functioning at full 1.8-MW capacity in strong winds, all day, every day, with no worries about storage. If they operate only eight hours a day (33% engineered capacity), we just use electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it. But that’s terribly inconvenient and disruptive.
So we employ the Dr. Hayden system, instead. We erect 4.8 million turbines that operate steadily for eight hours, sending one-third of their electricity to the grid and two-thirds to batteries. That would yield 8 hours of direct power while the wind is blowing (33% capacity factor) – and let us draw power from the batteries for the next 16 hours, until the wind regularly picks up again. “I love magic,” he says.
That clearly won’t work. We really need at least 48 hours of storage – and thus three times as many turbines, under a similar arrangement, but providing more flexibility, to recognize unpredictable wind patterns and the likelihood of two windless days in a row. We’re up to 14.4 million 1.8-[MW] turbines.
Want a bigger safety net? To assure against seven windless days? 50 million turbines should do it.
But then we’re really into the mediocre wind sites. Capacity plummets to 16.5% or so. Perhaps 100 million turbines will do the trick. Pray that lulls last no more than a week. Or send the army to those intransigent, unpatriotic coastal communities, and forcibly install turbines in their super windy areas.
That would also ensure that electricity generation is close to our big urban centers – hence shorter transmission lines, and less cement, steel, copper, et cetera to build the power lines. It’s a win-win situation, except for those who have to look at or live next to turbines and transmission lines, of course.
How much land are we talking about, to generate 25 billion megawatt-hours of global annual electricity? Assuming top quality wind sites, at 5 kilowatts per acre (average output per land area for any turbine at the windiest locations), onshore turbines operating 24/7/365 would require some 570 million acres.
That’s 25% of the United States – or 30% of the Lower 48 US states. It’s almost all the land in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona combined!
Change the assumptions – change the numbers. To store electricity for windless days, total power generation (and thus turbine numbers and land acreage) begins to skyrocket. For 48 hours of backup, triple the power generation; that’s the entire Lower 48. For a full week of backup, add in Canada.
Let’s not forget the transmission lines and batteries. They also need land (and raw materials).
How many batteries? Storing 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity – to provide power for 48 windless hours for a US city of 700,000 people – would require 480,000 of Tesla’s new 100-kWh lithium-ion battery packs. Backing up 2.85 TW for just two windless days would require 1.4 trillion Tesla units! And this assumes the batteries are charged and discharged with 100% efficiency.
Just imagine the land, raw materials, mining, manufacturing and energy that would be needed to make all those batteries (and replace them every few years). As energy and technology analyst Mark Mills has noted, all the world’s existing lithium battery factories combined manufacture only a tiny fraction of that.
I’m sure the world’s battery makers would be more than happy to take our hard-earned taxpayer and consumer cash to build more factories and make all those batteries – to save us from dangerous climate change that is no longer governed by the sun and other powerful natural forces.
Let’s get real. It’s time to stop playing with pixie dust and renewable energy utopia schemes. Time to open our schools and legislatures to actual thinking about energy, sustainability, climate change and what makes our jobs, health and living standards possible. Time for full-bore studies and legislative hearings on all these issues – in the USA, UK, EU and everywhere else.
Sustainability and renewable energy claims are too grounded in ideology, magic and politics. Wind and solar energy forecasts ignore the need to find and mine vast new metal and mineral deposits – and open US lands that are now off limits, unless we want to import all our wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. They assume land use impacts don’t really exist if they are in other people’s backyards.
Worse, too often anyone trying to raise these inconvenient truths is shouted down, silenced, ignored. That has to stop. The stakes are too high for ideology and pixie dust to drive fundamental public policies.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and other books on the environment.
Note: My article fixing my previous math error has a stupid typo. It’s in the paragraph beginning “That clearly won’t work. The reference at the end of the paragraph to “1.8-GW turbines” should obviously read “1.8-MW turbines.”
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The sign of a skeptic / real scientist: mistakes are Admitted to.
“1.4 trillion Tesla units” This is only US$80 million trillion dollars and 75 years to build. A political wet dream. The epic carbon neutered energy transition. Carbon credits from Gaia herself.
Just create an alternative universe in the socialist neuron holders, then all is easily possible.
Don’t ask any engineers. They might be naysayers. Seek only meaningful dialogue with the main stream media. They create words, about feelings, that result in fertile imaginings, or as we say at the work face, “when mainstream media talks, people who have never built anything feel better”. Feelings are more important than “doings”.
At least until the power runs out. Then we are all “greenies” and engineers’ feelings no longer matter.
Do your calculations only include generation to meet total 2016 electricity demand?
If this is so, then you will need to redouble your totals to include electric demand for replacing transportation fossil fuel demands. I believe that the fossil fuel used for electric energy production in 2016 was around 29% of total fossil fuel usage while that used by transportation was 28% almost the same amount. So electrifying transportation would effectively double the amount of generation needed.
Then you would also need to electrify shipping and air traffic
More than likely you are still talking about 100-150 billion MWh or around 6 times your current figures to electrify current societal energy needs.
Then you will have the additional requirements for increased needs of developing countries. This could effectively increases energy needs 10 fold as the have not nations become developed.
Geoff and Bryan, here are might thoughts on this piece and in the context of Monckton’s open letter to Their Holinesses:
Unfortunately for their Holinesses, Driessen seriously understates the size of the problem. Just replacing current world electricity production with wind (or solar) does nothing for the poor of Africa and elsewhere without the affordable reliable power essential to lift them out of poverty. It also fails to address any growth in demand from higher populations anywhere, or for the replacement of fossil fuels for transport as some dreamers imagine can be done or, critically, for the massive increase in power required to make the concrete and steel etc. required for the millions of turbines and their transport erection, maintenance etc. And, it does not address the inevitable consequential massive environmental destruction that necessarily would follow such a crazy plan if it ever were to be attempted. Nor does Driessen address the trillions of dollars that all this would cost and where that would come from or what other necessary programs would be sacrificed to fund even a fraction of this foolishness. I’m sorry your Holinesses, your nice dream is just that; it will not happen because it cannot.
Oops might in first line should be my.
And don’t forget some additional units to replace those that wear out/fail!
CBC News, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Aug.29, 2017
Re: Wind turbines & contaminated well water.
http://cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/frustrated-chatham-kent-residents-stage-blockade-at-wind-turbine-site-1.4266462
More on the internet on this issue.
Chatham Daily News, Ontario, Canada, Aug.23, 2017
Re: Wind turbines & well water contamination.
North Kent wind power project area currently under construction.
http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/2017/08/23/motion-is-a-deflection-water-wells-first
Barbara, thanks for bringing this ‘reality check’ into the discussion. The Chatham-Kent story will force the government of Ontario to finally realize that residents are not just going to quietly relocate because turbines have been placed too close to their homes. The Ontario government has made some huge errors in siting. The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change was not/is not prepared to protect residents from the harm that industrial scale wind has caused. Lawsuits are coming.
London Free Press, Ontario, March 28, 2017
Re: Wind turbines, pile driving and well water contamination.
Note the impact area mentioned in this article.
http://www.lfpress.com/ur/story/1236858
Did I miss something, or did we go back and forth from 1.8 megawatt turbines to 1.8 gigawatt turbines there?
I only read the first 4 paragraphs of your article, mainly because I don’t doubt your numbers, but, your conclusion of only using batteries as a back up is a little narrow minded. Why didnt you include the use of clean burning hydrogen, or methane powered generators? This fuel can be produced and stored during low power consumption. Did you also factor in that homes might have a back up battery or fuel cell, or the use of electric cars to add power to the grid? Sadly I don’t have the numbers about how much fuel needs to be stored to run 5, 1 MW generators for 3 days straight.
Of course my biggest complaint about your artical is why you are only using wind power?
The author is only addressing wind power generation. That should be obvious. The original article had replied to an article about wind power; this is a correction, and does not expand upon the original focus. Please keep up.
Duane: I think he only used wind power because the other renewables are even worse. The low energy density, huge footprint and non dispatchabilty of solar makes it a non-starter. Biofuels are a joke. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much land would be required to “grow” the biodiesel that a city bus would consume in a year. It turned out to be the equivalent of 35 football fields! I did the calculation in my head while driving behind a city bus that had a sign on it proudly stating that “this bus runs on biodiesel”.
Not to mention CO2 is the evil entity and “burning biofuel” still produces CO2
No wonder Driessen did not catch his initial error. Way too f**king many v. a multiple of WTFM.
How about calculating what effect all these windmills have on the rotation of the earth. Crazy? Who would have thought that construction of the three gorges dam would change the inclination of the earth’s axis?
Fascinating. Slowed the rotation albeit by a minute amount. Didn’t know that.
For link lovers:
China’s Monster Three Gorges Dam Is About To Slow The Rotation Of The Earth
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-three-gorges-dam-really-will-slow-the-earths-rotation-2010-6
From Rutgers: Three Gorges Dam and the Earth’s rotation
http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/showthread.php?131082-Three-Gorges-Dam-and-the-Earth-s-rotation
HOW INFAMOUS HYDROELECTRIC DAM CHANGED EARTH’S ROTATION
http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2014/05/how-infamous-hydroelectric-dam-changed.html
0.06 microseconds.
Which is 0.0000006 seconds.
That is; assuming they’ve properly calculated a tiny drop of water, globally speaking, alleged leverage against a comparitively massive iron core planet.
• Up to 44 miles (70km) relatively light crust. Not overlook the crust’s significant water content and oceans. @2.2 to 2.9 grams per cm³, @2.2 to 2.9 metric tons per m³
http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/NatSci102/images/earthdens.jpg
• 1,800 miles (2,900km) of mantle. @3.3 to 5.6 grams per cm³, @3.3 to 5.6 metric tons per m³
http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/pre/pre-images/earthDensities.png
• Approximately 1,430 miles (2,300km) outer core @9.9 to 12.2 grams per cm³, @9.9 to 12.2 metric tons per m³
• Approximately 750 miles (1,200km) inner iron/nickel core @12.8 to 13.1 grams per cm³, @12.8 to 13.1 metric tons per m³
leaving one with the impression that:
A) NASA is abusing mathematic skills.
B) NASA’s rotation estimate is swamped by error range.
Which equates NASA’s “Three Gorges” rotation estimate to NASA “Sea ice predictions”. It sure appears NASA scientists are bored if dammed water Earth rotation effects are where they waste their time and computers.
Here’s hoping Bridenstine improves NASA’s talent usage quickly!
I thought dams sped up the rotation the close you got to the poles.
It is like a skater in a spin , who pulls their arms in toward their bodies central axis.
AS they explain in the first link:
A hard-boiled egg will spin much more easily than a raw egg. Do bodies of liquid water have a similar impact on Earth’s rotation? Would a frozen planet spin faster?
It’s not that the hard boiled egg spins faster, it’s that the energy from the spin is more efficiently transferred to the entire egg.
With a raw egg, you spin the shell, but the yolk doesn’t move. As a result, as soon as you let go, the shell starts slowing down while the energy is finally transferred to the yolk.
Sam: It may not be so crazy. The moon is slowing down the earth’s rotation due to the drag of the tides it creates and the law of conservation of angular momentum.
I like people who admit when they make a mistake. I have had to do so several times in my career. Yet I am still trying to get my head around why people outside the realm of Mann and his associates, the MSM and environmentalists believe that anthropogenic global warming is actually happening. I have followed almost every supposed evidence only to find that (a) it has been happening forever, (b) it is not really happening, or (c) if it is happening there are several other reasonable and provable explanations. Ask one “who believes in the orthodoxy” to explain sometime. Just sit back and listen. You probably will get either the simplest of answer, “why it must be happened since we burn all this fossil fuel” or bizarre answers “97% of the climate scientists say it is and we have proof.” Like most things now days there are those that prefer we be divided and never ever partake of real and objective debate. I remain amazed that there are people who claim AGW is based in good science but refuse to listen when someone presents hard data question that “good science.” As for what to do with wind turbines and solar arrays, there are ways to “store” wind and solar energy besides batteries, you could convert water into hydrogen, store the hydrogen or use it directly No I have worked out the conversion rates or cost, though certainly it would be another water use after the environmentalists have begun announcing that water is running out. I use to ask environmentalists if there was anything humans did that they approved of other than die. Never got a good answer.
Splitting water to make hydrogen and storing the hydrogen is not viable as storing hydrogen under pressure and for extended periods is dangerous, it eats steel for one thing. Using metal sponges is not cost effective at all. Pumping water with excess energy for hydroelectric later is site-limited and requires even more structures and infrastructure.
Also, the trillion battery packs not only have a limited lifetime, but so do the 100 million wind turbines. 10–15 years down the lone, all of these will need to be replaced and most of the materials are not recyclable. Denmark is up to its ears in broken turbine parts it cannot do anything with, other than just burying it all; like Denmark has lots of real estate for burying stuff.
Lithium hydride batteries also use coal in the cathode, which makes another pollution hazard when you make a trillion that need to be retired and replaced.
“Denmark is up to its ears in broken turbine parts it cannot do anything with, other than just burying it all; ”
I suspect environmental journalists sometimes hear of such downsides but “spike” them. I doubt that they seek out such facts when they interview people in the field; they never ask “Any negatives?”
You keep switching MW with GW!!
Who is the “you?’
See where the wind turbines are in GWs. A typical one is 2 MWs.
Then, Paul Driessen you need to fix these typos, otherwise using your figures when talking to someone else is useless. Update with bold and indicate that you’re doing that.
Glad I am not the only one to notice.
I am no one to get all pedantic about typos…I make plenty.
But that sort of typo is confusing, and having them on a report which is a correction should not be allowed to slip through.
just sayin’.
Yep… annoying as hell
The fun part is how you go about replacing those windmills when they wear out.
Suppose we wave a magic wand and ONLY build five million of them – magically efficient, magic storage. They’ll last for 25 years, maybe. So, every year, you’ll need to replace 200,000 of them, and salvage the 200,000 that fell over or caught on fire.
Five hundred and forty-seven new windmills, more or less, every single day.
Forever.
Yes, how many windmills does it take to make one windmill?
According to Gail Tverberg, > 1
I.e. renewable energy doesn’t provide enough energy to renew itself.
That’s an excellent point to make. When you look at production capabilities, trying to complete 547 entire turbines every day—even across multiple manufacturing sites—would be difficult if not impossible to do. The complexity of these units is not as obscene as an airplane but it’s no simple widget assembly either.
Assume 25 manufacturing plants around the U.S. That’s ~22 turbines per plant, per day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, or nearly one per hour per plant ’round the clock, all year long. Even if you upped the manufacturing plants to 100, that’s still 5.47/plant/day. And it also assumes 24/7/365 production. If the supply chain breaks down for whatever reason, you’re screwed.
But no-one has mentioned the elephant in the room. I doubt that they have tried making windmills (or batteries or solar cells) with just wind power
Or make the aluminum arms. There isn’t a wind farm or solar park in the world that can run one aluminum smelter!
[BTW, bye-bye Apple laptops.]
Your numbers are roughly in line with what would be expected. BTW, it should be noted that under real world conditions, even a national grid of wind turbines averaged out an entire year can vary by +/-20%.
The battery backup is the real kicker. Without massive battery backup renewables basically give all the negatives of centralized and decentralized energy production…but the energy storage costs alone are enough to make renewables unprofitable (even if the renewables themselves were free).
It should be noted that switching to an all-nuclear system would also require some kind of storage but the storage is only slightly more than is necessary to average out the daily load. Storage equivalent to 1/4 of daily load would do it with the plant capacity running roughly down the middle between peak/base load.
Interestingly enough, I found the cheapest way I could think of to deal with intermittency of wind (without depending on things like fossil fuels) would likely be to bore gigantic tunnels, line them with metal…and convert about half of wind turbine output straight into hydrogen…to be burned in conventional gas turbine peaking plants.
Poitsplace – all nuclear would not need energy storage. Where does that come from?
Using LIFTR and burning thorium and all our old nuclear waste, getting the leftover energy not used the first time, would allow largely decentralized energy, with each town and city independent of all others and each factory with its own power source. Perhaps some grid for back up, just in case, but a grid would largely be unneeded. A UPS truck-sized LIFTR would power a school for 9 or 10 years, before needing to be refueled. As the reactor is self-leveling and already liquid, it does not need human operators and thus is immune to human error.
If we went all nuclear for electricity, coal would be used for plastics and pharmaceuticals and would last 100s of years or more, natural gas and oil for transportation (the most energy dense and safest transportation energy and renewable from Earth’s core), and wind and solar just used at small scales for sites that are remote from other energy sources and do not need a constant energy supply.
Well the vast majority of reactors aren’t ones that can be varied substantially. And while it’s true the LFTR could be throttled a lot more easily, I don’t really consider them truly mature technologies. I know they will likely be like that and I expect them to be…but I know if we started building right now we’d be stuck with older stuff. I don’t want to let a case of the “s’posed-to’s” blind me…the same mentality that blinds people pushing for renewables and people thinking global warming is a certainty.
What most people don’t get is through the nuclear island is slow to react to change in the load, as long as it has enough cooling the steam island can change with the closing of a valve. You dump the extra heat into the cooling towers as waste and you can follow any load.
Good comments on nuclear. Yes it s not great at load following but it can and it does, and yes the nuclear equivalent of simply dumping steam (blowing the safety valves) isn’t such an issue when the fuel cost is trivial.,
AND a massive boiler that can store superheated steam is probably easier than a molten salt/hydrogen store etc etc
Nuclear storage doesn’t have to be great: seasonal variation is accounted for by scheduling maintainence for low demand months. Reactors can be throttled back at weekends, Short term demands can be met by steam reservoirs or pumped storage or hydro.
It is solar that is the absolute worst in terms of storage needs. Winter output is minimal, and that’s peak demand time any latitude where houses don’t routinely come with air con.
Good baseload reduces grid problems to demand fluctuations. Adding intermittent renewable energy increases the problems of dispatch.
I.e. demand fluctuation is already a problem,, but its made infinitely worse by adding intermittent renewables as the first choice of generating plant.
What you’re talking about is a decentralized, non-governmental controlled energy web that meets the needs of discrete population centers. That is the exact opposite of the globalist, One World Order garbage that the Left seems intent on shoving down everyone’s throat. Ergo, it won’t gain any traction. Pity, though. It really could work very well.
What you’re talking about is a decentralized, non-governmental controlled energy web that meets the needs of discrete population centers. That is the exact opposite of the globalist, One World Order garbage that the Left seems intent on shoving down everyone’s throat. Ergo, it won’t gain any traction. Pity, though. It really could work very well.
The problem with a nuclear only energy system dealing with variable demand is economic, not technical.
Nuclear is very capital intensive and must be run 24/7/365 in order to get a good return on capital. Building sufficient nuclear capacity to deal with peak load implies that there is excess capacity that is not needed all the time.
80% nuclear is about the right level of nuclear supply. The last 20% is best provided by natural gas that has low capital cost and high fuel cost, just right for a peaking application. Given the cost of natural gas is currently very low, that is an added bonus.
Not so. Nuclear plants can always run at full capacity, the fuel is inexpensive. In case of less demand, synthetic fuels are produced for transportation. Also, heat may be stored as hot water for homes.
XYZZY.11: Actually they did. The engineers at Google came to the conclusion that it was impossible to generate enough energy with renewables for them to renew themselves.
This post demonstrates why clean energy is but a pipe dream. It is politically unfeasable. Once people come to realize what clean energy means pragmatically, they just vote the bums out of office. Kind of a political “negative feedback loop” of sorts. (keeps the system stable… ☺)
“… they just vote the bums out of office.”
You assume here that they will just go quietly.
They can go screaming, as long as they go! Heck, they can go scream back at the screaming arctic.
I’ve done similar calculations for the UK, using actual national grid dataset and historical data to estimate what would
The one thing I will add is the “7 windless days” assumption, which is common throughout this kind of analytical work, came up as very much conservative. OK, sometimes it’s 2,3, or 5 days, but the general assumption is that the battery buffer needs to be in this order of magnitude. But wind has multiple periodicities, and the 6-month seasonal lags are much bigger than the 5-day “weather system” lags.
This means that, when you look at real world data, its not the “5 bad days” that break the buffer. Its “5 fairly bad days”, followed by another “5 fairly poor days” then another….then another…a string of below average conditions rather than a single cataclysmic “no wind” event. I don’t know what the US figures would be like, but for the UK the actual battery storage requirement was 55 (fifty five!) full days per annum at a 1-to-1 supply-to-demand pure renewable build. And that only handled 10-year weather events. I was horrified; it was much worse than I had imagined.
Yep, I guestimated a bit more but yeah. If you really want to be horrified, look into the amount of concrete and steel necessary to make them. It would take about 10% of world production of concrete/steel every year to build/maintain that much wind capacity. It takes about 5X the concrete/steel it would take to make the same capacity of even the older style of nuclear plant BUT…those would last about twice as long, wouldn’t require the backup systems…
The planet simply won’t use renewables unless there is literally no other choice…the cost, materials, labor, environmental footprint, and inconveniences are simply too high. It is insanity to even consider current renewables in any kind of global rollout.
And if it turns out that hydro-carbons are actually renewable, via some here-to-fore unimagined tectonic or other sub-surface process deep within the Earth, we will have to figure out what to do with the eventual excess inventory of coal and crude. Or do we still assume that only a finite amount of the stuff was always there, however it got there, and wherever “there” happens to be?
Fossil fuels being fossils is not some mere assumption.
It is a conclusion based on large amounts of evidence.
It could be wrong, but it is not an assumption…it was not simply “assumed” to be true one fine day.
But whatever the process by which it originated…there is more of it than most people suppose.
I recall the UK winter of 2010. Here is the Met office report. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/jan2010
During this period, which is approximately 1 month, there was a blocking high siting off the UK and which brought calm and windless conditions not simply to the UK but also to much of North West Europe.
i recall check every day the energy grid outputs during this period. During this period, the maximum wind output was 8% of nameplate capacity which was reached on a few days, most of the days it was between 3 to 5%, and it was not infrequently the case that it was listed at less than 1% of nameplate capacity.
In these very cold conditions, it is necessary to not only keep the rotors spinning so as to avoid bearing/shaft deformations, but also to heat the oil and possibly defrost the rotors. This consumes quite a lot of energy and it is likely that when the grid listed wind as producing about 4% nameplate capacity, wind as a whole was probably a net drain on the grid. The national grid never detail how much energy is being drawn by windfarms not producing energy.
During this winter, the entire country was blanketed in snow such that solar panels would be producing very little if any energy at all, and of course in the winter there are few hours of sunshine and the low solar angle means that solar irradiance reaching the ground is weak.
The fact is that 48 hours of spare downtime capacity is insufficient. With the variances of the weather one needs at least a week, and if one is 100% reliant upon renewables then one needs at least a month of spare capacity.
Renewables need to be able to hand disaster scenarios so as not to exacerbate what is already a catastrophe, Had the UK been 100% reliant upon renewable energy there would have been tens of thousands of deaths. Many people do not appreciate that if electricity is down then even if one has gas fired or oil fired central heating this does not work wince the starter and circulating pump is inactive. Even modern pellet burning stoves do not work without continuous electricity.
Hi Alistair, any chance you could put these into a post for here ? Or, if you already have them posted, a link to that would be great.
It would be very useful as I’m waiting a date to meet the Prime Minister (my MP) in the next few weeks to discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy generally and explain some of the nonsense being put about.
I’m currently having ‘exchanges’ with OLEV (Office for Low Emission Vehicles) about the increased CO2 emissions from battery manufacture. They appear to believe there will be be none as all batteries will be manufactured using renewables (based on Tesla’s Gigafactory)….. Just in the process of pointing out to them that the Nissan Battery plant in Sunderland which has 11.35MW renewable nameplate capacity (6.6MW wind, 4.75MW solar) will only produce at an annualised rate of ~2.14MW based on UK figures from DECC of 27% for wind and 9% for solar …… and as Nissan state the nameplate capacity is sufficient to meet (just) 7% of the plant’s needs this falls to an insignificant 1.32% once nameplate is converted to real generation. So we have a real example here in the UK of increased CO2 emissions from battery manufacture.
Nissan have just sold the plant to the Chinese along with their other global battery plants – Bloomberg and Forbes are predicting Chines share of the vehicle battery market at between 65% – 84% by 2020 and as we know from the Paris Climate ‘Agreement’ and INDCs Chinese CO2 emissions are set to Double between now and 2030. How much of that will be making Lithium Ion batteries is anyones guess, but it is going to be significant.
Thanks
OE
Should have explained the Nissan plant in Sunderland is their main UK car manufacturing plant and the renewables were for that – the battery plant was a more recent addition.
For that many lithium batteries, all the lithium mining sites in Australia, China, Chile etc. would become huge toxic waste areas as would the refining and battery manufacturing sites. Where will all the power come from to manufacture the batteries, make all the steel and concrete for the turbines and transport to site? The neodymium and dysprosium used in the generator magnets are rare earth metals also with toxic wastes and huge mining impacts. The mining for coking coal and cement ingredients will have large environmental impacts. The coking coal used to make steel and the kilns used to make cement have massive amounts of emissions.
Until a turbine can generate enough power to replicate itself and related batteries we are just going backwards using more and more fossil fuels.
You haven’t factored in turbine failures, maintenance downtime. Probably need to add another 5 to 10% to the numbers.
Finally, how long before all the bats and birds are dead?
@Musk Lemon
“Until a turbine can generate enough power to replicate itself and related batteries we are just going backwards using more and more fossil fuels.”
I think it can just about do that….but it’s very thin margin and the cost likewise spirals towards infinity. A good turbine with good placement can get an EROEI of 8-ish, but on a civilisation scale project like this most of them will be 4. Once you add battery back up manufacture it drops again.
A 1.8 MW onshore nameplate will be about 0.4 MW mean output for a civilisation scale project. 5 days of backup for that is 24x 0.4 x 5 = 48 MWh of batteries. The batteries will be, say, $200/KWh or $9.6m for this one turbine alone. The LCE for the turbine is about $60/MWh, IIRC. For a generous 25 (hah!) years life of both systems the turbine cost is ~3500 MWh per year x 25 years x $60 = $5.25m
So the costs of the batteries is actually going to be greater than the cost of the turbines for this kind of set up. Total EROEI will be about 2, or slightly lower than that of a feudal agricultural society and a standard of living to match.
Bats and birds chopped up for Al Gore and Friends. Show me the variance permitting this, please.
ML,
You should study the record of average and better mining companies to be assured that in even moderately advanced countries there are not any or many examples of uncontrolled toxic wastes no matter what is being mined. Accidents can happen of course, as we see with everyday automobile use. But, overall, the fears you express about lithium mines in Australia are essentially groundless.
There is more to life than worrying yourself sick over imaginary scenarios. Geoff
If you use the published figures e.g. from ‘save the eagles’ all US eagles are already dead.
In fact apart from a few first generation wind farms like Altamont Pass, bird deaths are exceptionally low (yet people use the few worst cases to extrapolate to all wind farms)
Ah! Proof by assertion.
I spect bird deaths are now low, Griff, because the birds were all killed a decade ago.
Not that you would care.
All the more reason to site future wind farms over the water. It is REALLY hard to count dead birds floating (or not) in the ocean. They get eaten very fast!
In the minds of the media a low dead bird count equals not many birds killed. That fact shows that the ‘media’ are not the brightest bulbs in the basket.
More lies…
Call yourself an environmentalist?
But hey, just as long as you’re getting paid for it, you’ll make excuses for anything, no matter how flat out evil, won’t you?
Now go and apologise for slandering Dr. Crockford.
But you won’t will you, because you’re one of the worst types of coward there is, the type that will never admit to his mistakes.
“replacing the 2.85 terawatts of electricity generated worldwide in 2016” – do I need to read further or first wait until another correction when the author’s learned the most basic units?
No, that is the correct average power level. Multiply by 8760 to get the yearly total energy in terawatt-hours.
Then speak about “average electric power”, not generated electricity. But it goes on the same way – lots of errors.
I have a question. It is stated that there would be 5kW per acre land area average output for a turbine at the windiest locations. Once installed, the turbine occupies very little acreage. And that includes the converter site. So where does the 5 acre per turbine come from?
You can’t put turbines next to each other as turbulent wake effects screw each other up.
It’s worse for large fields, which grossly underperform equivalent stand-alone turbines by a factor of 2.
The 5kW per acre is an average figure based on a “reasonable” wind resource and turbine spacing. I’ve also heard 2w/m^2 quoted.
Thanks for the clarification.My education continues, thanks to this site and the denizens herein.
2W/sq m is a fairly consistent figure used industry wide.
However:
1/. Offshore my be better. 20-40% better
2/. Going higher collects more wind per square meter. Often better than linear if the turbine blades get further out of the boundary later.
3/. For a given size, turbine efficiency is probably as close to the Betz limit as its worth trying to get.
4/. Turbine development is therefore towards increased height and MTBF.
5/. Do not underestimate the unbelievable stresses on a cantilevered bearing carrying a HUGE turbine blade set whose blades are chopping into low speed ground effect air and turbulence and passing a support tower three times a revolution, and may be called upon to operated from -20C to +40C in all conditions up to and including strong magnetic fields and salt spray – a recipe for instant corrosion of most metals, as well as asymmetric build up of e.g. dead insect bat and bird parts, ice and snow..on the blades
6/. Do not underestimate the problems of maintenance in such conditions either.
The final answer? wind turbines are basically a huge engineering problem whose limitations are not being and cannot be overcome – certainly not at sensible levels of cost.
If you want rotating machinery to last and be safe, you put it inside in a controlled environment and keep things like birds and hang gliders and parachutists away from it, and if you want it to be cheap and easy to maintain you do the same thing. And you dont allow members of the public to be within the distance that a blade of 200mph tip speed is capable of being thrown either.
If it were any other firm of engineering these would be banned on safety grounds, No 1 on any environmentalists lists to be outlawed, and would fail as economically totally unviable .
And yet, there they are, giving the three fingers to common sense and the environment and economics.
Exactly. Most turbines are in agricultural sites, so most of the 5 acres is used for crops.
Good article, Paul. One more thing though – how to engineer a vast (or even a small) national or regional power network completely without synchronous 60 Hz baseload power? I am not a power engineer, but my understanding from reports about the recent South Australian blackout was that to recover their power network a large baseload power plant had to be started first, because the individual turbines need to synchronise their output (in voltage, frequency and phase) to the voltage, frequency and phase of the power from the baseload generator before they could be connected to the network. The reverse apparently does not work. So, in a network with no baseload power source, how does the network ever get started, let alone recover from a major failure?
You can use batteries to provide some of the transmission support necessary without spinning turbine but the batteries have to be kept at 50% level to respond to transmission needs. Seems to me like you need even more batteries than assumed here
Like this… its quicker than spinning reserve or starting a fossil plant:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/02/02/restoring-the-grid-after-a-blackout-using-batteries/
From the younicos news:
So is in testing. Hope it’s successful. Anyway this doesn’t resolve the “amount” of battery need for a whole electric needs.
I would synchronize phase with 1PPS. Frequency and voltage are simple.
Its not beyond the wit of man to synch inverters for a black start from even batteries. Its not commonly been a requirement of ‘bolt on green stripe’ ‘renewables’ to do so, though.
children will not know what birds are…………
https://twitter.com/StopTheseThings/status/903883069068787712/photo/1
To avoid the mentioned mistakes, usually a result of mixing kWh, GWh, with “kWh in a day or year”, in other words erroneously treating kW and kWh as synonymous, can easily be avoided by using joules (J) instead or alongside watthours (Wh) with the appropriate prefix. I wish WUWT writers would at least include the J with Wh. Combined with prefixes, we would replace also such violation of brevity as millions of kWh and billion of millions …..
The treatise below is intended to help in this mater and also provide useful numerical values with the joule.
Energy and power terminology and units:
Life would be simpler and calculations easier, if we accept that energy has the unit joule (J), and power, being a measure of energy flow, is in joules per second (J/s), which is conveniently expressed in watts (J/s = W).
To see the inconvenience of having more than one power and energy unit, look at your household appliances – toasters, air-conditioners, heaters, ovens. They are all energy consuming devices, but their power consumption is expressed in varied units such as kWh/d, Btu/hr, hp, V·A, and W. On the other hand, energy producing devices, such as wind mills, solar panels, home generators, and coal and nuclear power plants, are almost universally in watts (kW, MW, GW). Sharing data would be a breeze if the unit were just the watt in both cases. Then, thinking of efficiency, you could readily see that if a given amount of heat flow generated by burning coal produces 1/3 of that as electricity flow, that plant has 33 % efficiency. Similarly, the efficiency of your solar panels would be immediately apparent by comparing the wattage of the solar insolation reaching them with the wattage of the AC electricity flowing out.
Now a few examples for illustration:
You may consider buying a wind mill with a rating of 10 kW, and you want to know if that’s enough for your small, all-electric house. Your old utility bills state that the household consumes 40 000 kWh/y. The answer to the question is readily seen when the house usage is converted into watts: Since 1 kWh is the same as 3.6 MJ and since there are 31.5 Ms in a year, your house uses 40 000 x 3.6 / 31.5 = 4600 J/s which is 4.6 kW, less than half the wind-mill’s capacity.
That “half” sounds great, but not quite that great when we consider that the 10 kW rating is the maximum power the mill is capable of generating when the wind is blowing at the designed-for speed. Of course, it will not blow that way all the time and sometimes not at all. The actual output depends on many factors, but a good guess is that the mill will net 1/5th of the capacity rating. Thus the mill, at 10/5 = 2 kW average output, is, contrary to above, not big enough. A 25 kW rating would do (with means for electricity storage for calm days, of course).
All such calculations are this simple when you know your energy consumption in watts. For example, you may want to know how much area of photovoltaic cells would be needed to provide for the house’s 4.6 kW, and the house is located in a region where the Sun delivers the U.S. year-average insolation of 200 W/m2 at the ground level. Then, 4600/200 = 23 m2.
Again, this is for a 100 % efficient panel. In reality, only about 1/6th of the incoming energy changes into electricity, and so the actual area would need to be six times that, or 138 m2.
Now let’s look at some cost comparisons. With W and J, they are similarly easy to do.
How much would it cost to buy and install a PV system for that 4.6 kW house? Reading about solar energy in the news you notice the lowest, installed cost quoted as 7 $/W (a bit less in Arizona, a bit more in New England). Thus the cost is 7 x 4600 = $32,000.
Here again, that price per watt is for the case of peak output, i.e., perpetual noon sun. With the Sun sleeping at night, and napping behind clouds occasionally, the year-average power will be about 1/6th of the former, and thus the real best cost is six times that, or $192,000.*
Now the cost of energy: Comparisons among electricity, oil, gas and other fuels are again easy if we employ only joules regardless of the “kind” of energy. Say you pay 10 ¢/kWh for electricity generation cost. Converted, that is 10/3.6 = 2.8 ¢/MJ. And you buy natural gas at 80 ¢/100 cubic feet; now 1 ft3 of natural gas contains 1.1 MJ, so the cost is 80/110 = 0.7 ¢/MJ. Comparing the two numbers shows that electricity costs 2.8/0.7 = 4 times more. Energy in fuel-oil priced at $4 per gallon, where 1 gal contains 150 MJ, costs 400/150 = 2.7 ¢/MJ, about the same as electricity except that here it includes the delivery charge. Adding the delivery charge to electricity, typically another 10 ¢/kWh on a residential bill, yields 5.6 ¢/MJ which is twice the oil energy cost.
Stan Jakuba
From my experience with island systems we would need 5KW installed wind power and ca. 0.5 Tesla packs per person to produce and back up 22,000TWh of electricity produced worldwide.
Do not forget the amount lost during the storage and retrieval part of the equation.
Then to is the fact that some devices use power at a rapid rate.
So discharge rates will have to be sufficient.
Since there is no way at present to store grid scale electricity for anywhere near the intervals required, it is just dumb, IMO, to even be talking about this.
Hard to believe we are still talking about this as if it was not some delirious fantasy.
Your analysis ignores solar, which could pick up half of wind’s down days, esp in the south, esp during the day when the load is high. It also makes the assumption that we must always have continuous non brown power, which ain’t necessarily a truth, and ignores the fact that battery whole house backup might become common place.
Exciting times are coming, who knows what will be around in 10 years.
My comments were directed to the CFACT “analysis”, not Jake.
According to a Solar City sales manager I know, batteries for solar cost $5,000 a pop, and can only store 1.5 hrs worth per before having to be recharged.
He said if you’re off the grid completely, and not using the local utility, you need an absolute minimum of six batteries per house which is nine hours of peak load. Solar, he said, cannot power your AC or refrigerator without the batteries.
I asked why he was telling me this. He said he joined the company full of green sustainability fervor and ‘wanting to save the environment’. Now he thinks Solar City is a scam. What he was bitter about was that the Solar City brass (and Musk) knew all this.
And this is why it is very misleading for warmists to claim the cost of solar is going down.
It is true that the price of solar panels has decreased, but this is a very small part of the system, and the costs of associated equipment batteries, inverters, wiring etc has not dropped, and is unlikely to drop.
You can buy yourself some panels, an invereter and limited storage for around €6,000 which is fine if you want to use the grid for most of your power needs, but a proper off grid system costs more in the region of €25,000 to €30,000, and therein lies the problem.
I have a holidiay home in Spain. My neighbour has an integrated diesel generator of around 8kW which in 2006 cost about €2,000. When there are power outtages, and these are a frequent experience in Spain, it will run his fridges, 1 aircon and miscellaneous demands.
One could buy 2 of these generators for around €5,000 and then be left with some €20,000 to €25,000 for fuel. It makes more sense to go off grid with a diesel generator than it does with solar panels.
It is only the subsidies that might alter the equation. Without subsidies, solar makes no sense unless there is no other alternative..
Exciting times?
What, as in brownout riots and looting on a daily basis?
Skeptical,
We don’t require continuous, non-brown power? Really? Are you an idiot? If you want to find out just how wrong you are, I suggest you have someone come over to your house at irregular intervals and turn off your power for random amounts of time. Let’s see how well you get along. Like it or not, our current civilization is completely dependent on continuous, non-brown power. End that, and our civilization ends. No more Internet, no more cell phones, no more computers. Forget about maintaining the current population without reliable refrigeration.
Forget about living in the deep south in Summer in closed up houses with few windows.
You can go all summer in Florida without ever seeing wind over 5 MPH after sunset, or much above 8 MPH during the day.
Bye-bye southern Nevada (Vegas) and the southern half of Arizona (Phoenix and Tucson). Unless the Climate Police allow the Boulder Dam.
The sun, I think, very often shines down on the rooftops of southern homes and factories? just when they need their aircon?
<blockquote.The sun, I think, very often shines down on the rooftops of southern homes and factories? just when they need their aircon?
Once again Griff appears to be demonstrating a lack of understanding. I have lived and worked in a number of Northern European countries and have a holiday home in Southern Spain so I am well acquainted with a range of climates and living styles.
In Northern European countries, there is all but no aircon fitted to people’s homes. Work places may well have aircon, but a roof top array is incapable of providing the needs of work places located in blocks of flats which is the norm in major cities.
From a domestic point of view, even in Southern European countries the requirement for aircon during the day is limited. Most people spend much of the day outside, and the property is not excessively warm during the day. A house begins to feel excessively warm in the evening when one sits down. It is at this stage when the heat is really noticed and is brought about by two factors.
First, it takes many hours of afternoon sunshine to warm the bricks of the building. Gradually the building becomes more and more like a storage heater and the heat built up during the course of the day, radiates at night just when the sun is beginning to get low and set, and just when solar has little practical use. Second, sitting down and being inactive highlights the heat. Just getting up and walking around one immediately feels cooler, possibly this act alone assists evaporation and thus the skin is cooled. thus aircon becomes useful in the evening but this is when there is little sun.
Solar powered aircon may be useful in a countries in the Middle East (where there is a high demand for aircon midday), but has limited application in Europe even in Southern Europe.
Whilst discussing solar, I will comment upon the intermittent non dispatchable nature of solar. I have solar heating on my swimming pool, and it is generally useless. It will not heat my swimming pool to acceptable temperatures in Feb, March, April, October and November. It works very well in June, July and August, but it is not required in those months. At most it extends the swimming season by 2 to 3 weeks either end of the season due to the intermittent nature of sunshine.
The problem is the sunshine hours, and there is no sun at night. My solar can heat the water by around 4degC in around 8 hours, but the problem is that when the pool is say 13degC in early March, and the solar heating during the day raises the temperature to say 16 deg C, or so, the sun sets, it is cold at night and the following morning the pool is back at 13 degC. It never has a chance to build up temperatures because the sun does not shine 24/7.
By contrast my neighbour has a heat pump. It can only increase the temperature by about 2 degC in 24 hours, but it can do this 24/7 for weeks on end, so that when the pool starts off at 13 degC, the next day it is at 15 degC, the next at 17 deg C, the next at 19 degC etc.so that eventually it reaches about 30 degC and maintains that temp.
In July and August I can heat my pool up to say 37 degC but I do not need that temperature. With no solar heating the pool will be between 30 to 33degC
I am not suggesting that solar has no uses, but one should not oversell its use.
In the UK low wind generally coincides with winter highs, zero solar and peak demand.
Solar is especially useless after dark. When you need lighting.
I am sure that you have a solution for that though. Involving unicorn fart and pixie dusts.
Demand of course falls dramatically after about 10 pm in the UK until 6 the following morning.
There are about 5 days a year in which there is high pressure and high demand across all of the UK – a not insolvable problem.
and of course the UK 2050 target is only for 80% renewable electricity
It appears that Griff has little knowledge of UK conditions and weather patterns and weather events.
It appears that Griff is unaware of the winters of 2009/10 and the winter of 2010/11 when there was next to no wind for almost a month.
I have posted above (September 4, 2017 at 3:08 am) details for the winter off 2009/10. Details of the winter 2010/11 are set out at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/2011/winter
Wikipedia states:
Once again, on a daily basis I monitored the details provided by the national grid for wind energy and once again, wind did not produce more than 8% of nameplate capacity and was generally around the 3 to 4% of nameplate capacity for a best part of a month.
As I mentioned above, any energy has to be capable of handling disaster scenarios and wind energy just cannot meet the winter energy requirements of the UK.
The winter of 2009/10 was described as a 1 in 30 event. This was followed the next year by the winter of 2010/11 which was described as a 1 in 100 event. The fact is that 1 in 100 events not infrequently occur, and even if an event is a rare event of that nature one cannot allow a developed country like the UK to grind to a halt. Quite literally there would have been a huge death toll had the UK been reliant only upon wind and solar during those winters.
There has been a vast amount of wind added since 2010.
We’ve seen December figures of 18% of demand met by wind – with 150% of 2016 capacity intended to be added by 2020. We are looking at 50% of demand met by wind in a typical December beyond 2020.
Look at the figures with that level of capacity, more widely distributed, in mind (and an increase to 10GW installed solar, with much more to come)
There has, but it does not overcome the problems caused by wind which the variability.
Just for simplicity sake, if one were to just consider 100% reliance on wind and if the UK requires 60GW grid capacity, and if wind has an average capacity factor of 25% if the UK installed 240GW of wind, on average it could supply all the UK energy demands.
However, and herein lies the problem, since there would still be periods when the combined output of wind would total less than 1GW, the UK would still need 60GW of back up generation.
One has to build 2 grids, not one and the backup power is being used very inefficiently and therefore producing a lot of CO”.
Below I have set out details of the UK experience for the years 2013 and 2014. I attach a similar report covering the period 2008 to 2010 which identifies similar problems with wind.
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/wind-report.pdf
In 2008, the UK had some 2,974MW of installed capacity, which by 2010 had risen to 5,204GW of installed capacity and yet for many days in December 2010, under 100MW, ie about 1.9% of installed capacity.
So if the UK had had 60 GW of installed wind capacity (instead of some 5.2GW), the total output on those many December days would have been no better than 1.15GW requiring some 59GW of backup.
It is the intermittent and variable nature of wind that is the problem.
“There are about 5 days a year in which there is high pressure and high demand across all of the UK”
More drivel.
Sometimes a blocking high can persist for weeks.
I presume you DO realise there British citizens on here that read your lies about the British Isles and can call you out for the mendacious little ‘Unreliables’ paid pimp that you are?
Or are you so lacking in self-respect that you truly don’t care what a laughing-stock you are?
Now go and apologise to Dr, Crockford for trying to harm her employment prospects.
Has anyone done an analysis of space-based solar collectors? Is it possible/feasible to collect solar energy in space and beam it to earth? Would the collectors block too much sun from reaching the surface?
The problem with space-based power generation is in getting the power back to the ground. All feasible solutions have too much loss to make them practical.
Thanks for your response, Mr. Penrose.
I found a 2015 IEEE article that indicates the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is actively researching microwave transmission of power from space. According to the article, JAXA expects to have a small demonstration of power transmission from low space orbit sometime next year. This might be a key technology for really harnessing reliable power from the sun, but it is a long way off right now.
I believe that “renewable” energy is a fraud. But, if you tried to make it work, you would install a lot of solar to go with the wind. But, that is a quibble. You would have to install four systems where we now have one. (Solar, Wind, Battery, and Gas Turbine so we don’t freeze in the dark next Jan 4th). Which is so wildly uneconomic as to be insane.
A typical wind turbine is this:
https://www.vestas.com/en/products/turbines/v110%202_0_mw#!facts
2.0 MW. I am confused as to why you us this: 1.8-GW turbines
I cannot imagine such a wind turbine exists.
If they can make a 2.0, why can’t they make a 1.8?
The second biggest wind *farm* is only 1.5GW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations#Onshore
Oh, I see he did write 1.8 Gigawatts above. When he got around to the calculations he used megawatts. I will cut him some slack for what is clearly a typo.
erast, do look at a list of offshore windfarms (which apart from being larger have a measured capacity rate 32 to 40% in UK waters)
Compare MW to GW in my above.
8 to 9MW turbines are actually installed off the UK and 12MW turbines are in development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestas_V164
One way to skin this cat would be to find industrial processes that can be run intermittently (i.e., when the wind feels like blowing) and which run with minimal human intervention. Some ideas are electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, liquifying air, and producing ammonia. All of these products can be used to produce energy, and have many other important uses in the economy. Such as ammonia which is important for making fertilizer. Could this system replace rel electricity generation usinf fossil fuels or nuclear power? No. But, it might be useful.
Don’t those processes have physical capital required- they required lots which costs money. They also require some degree of reliability because the processes need management. Would you build a house that you can use sometimes? If your general production is rather low you’d really prefer a small plant that you use continuously rather than a large plant that is sitting around a good deal of the time especially in an erratic pattern.
Just trying to make the best of a very bad situation. The battery thing is hopeless.
Has anybody calculated how many turbines required to provide electricity for electric vehicles should they replace petrol and diesel?
40,000 for Germany, from there my guess for the entire world: ca. 1 million.
Ha! Not even close. Where did you get those numbers? Multiply those numbers by a thousand and you might sound a little more credible.
@Paul Penrose Unlike you I did some real calculations.
I notice you didn’t show any of your calculations to support your claim, nor any of your base assumptions. Until you do that, it’s just all guess work as far as I’m concerned. And my guesses are just as valid as yours.
Paul a 1.8 GW wind turbine, now that really would be something! No doubt the world’s biggest gyroscope. I presume you mean 1.8 MW?
The problem for windmills is several-fold. One, the drivers are renewable, the technology is not. Two, they cannot be reasonably isolated from the environment, which limits their utility. Three, as for any low-density, low energy producer, there is a environmental blight factor. Four, they create an ecological hazard for endangered and protected species. So, windmills should be properly characterized, then selected to purpose. Unfortunately, the political myths invented and spread by politicians, scientists (e.g. prophecy of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), industry (e.g. clean, green, renewable energy), and lobbyists (i.e. environmentalists) are first-order forcings of resource misallocation and developmental misalignment.
and what happens to the number of windmills needed when transportation goes electric?
4 million for the existing electric power, 1 million for cars. Or divide by two if half of that is produced by photovoltaic.
BTW Germany would need 200,000 total. Currently we have 29,000 and there is hardly any place left where wind is strong enough.
“there is hardly any place left where wind is strong enough.”
And yet warmist extrapolations probably don’t make deductions from this “low-hanging fruit” factor.
@roger Knights, yeah the problem is: power is proportional to the third power of wind speed. And if nominal wind speed is 12m/s, then 6m/s wind produces only 25% of the nominal power. And the best places are already in use. In Baden-Würtemberg (where the government is Green) they place wind turbines now where average wind speed is below 5m/s. So the electricity generation by the new turbines will be only half as large as for the old ones.
Don’t forget that these massive wind turbines need to be located at least 1km from people’s homes.
The calculations are so riddled with errors, they do not deserve to be taken seriously, but no doubt the site readers will brandish them as proof we can never go clean.
World electricity consumption 25 terawatt hours/per anum.
A 2.5-3 MW wind turbine (the current on-shore size) produces 6 Gigawatt hours/per anum.
Thus, the number of turbines would be about 4 million, worldwide, and take up something about the size of Alaska.
However, most wind is heading off shore, and the largest of these turbines are the 10MW devices. This would bring that down to about 2 million, taking into account that some countries are land locked.
Batteries are only used for transient spikes of minutes, hours at most. To use them for mass storage is uneconomic, at least at the moment. Pumped hydro, compressed air, and for solar thermal, molten salt are the storage means of choice. These typically have 80-90% + recovery rate.
But even this figure is clearly ridiculous, as solar is making great strides, and quite cheap these day, many contracts now being signed in the 3-5c per KWh range, about the same price as coal, cheaper than gas, and much, much cheaper than nuclear.
But please, do keep producing erroneous calculations, calling people “warmists” and “green fascists”. Your collective help is greatly appreciated.