Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – According to Professor Jack Ponton of Edinburgh University, an additional 16,000 wind turbines covering 90,000 square kilometres (35,000 square miles) will be required to charge Britain’s electric cars, if Britain converts to an all electric car fleet.
Wind farms would need to ‘cover whole of Scotland’ to power Britain’s electric vehicles
SCOTLAND would need to be entirely covered by wind farms in order to power all of Britain’s electric cars, according to a leading academic.
By PAULA MURRAY, EXCLUSIVE
PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, Oct 29, 2017
Jack Ponton, emeritus professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, said another 16,000 turbines would be required in order to replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to phase out the internal combustion engine by 2032 – eight years ahead of the rest of the UK.
But Prof Ponton said that, even if the issues of power generation and charging points were sorted out, the National Grid could simply not cope with the increased demand.
He said: “It is a nice idea as electric cars are much more efficient, cleaner and actually simpler devices than the current internal combustion engine vehicles.
“Technically, it is an excellent idea. But the problem starts when you begin to think, ‘Where are you going to get the energy to run them?’.
“I’ve seen three different estimates for the amount of new generating capacity that we would need if were going to have all the cars in Britain running on electricity.
“The most detailed calculation says we’d be looking at five Hinkley nuclear stations to run this. It would be the best way, the most efficient way to get electricity because nuclear power stations can run 90 per cent of the time.
“If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.”
…
This isn’t the first time British academics have run the numbers and demonstrated that renewables are utterly impractical. Back in 2008, Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Department of Physics, who also holds a PHD in computation from Caltech, upset advocates by running a few numbers and demonstrating how ridiculously inadequate renewables are to the task of powering Britain.
The renewables juggernaut rolls on regardless. Years from now, historians will marvel at how such eyewatering sums of public money were squandered on such a useless energy solution, and how people who claim they care about nature were seduced into covering the landscape with bird and bat killing industrial monstrosities.
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It’s starting to look like Titusville, Pa.
Where can I get a position in lithium futures? Dead cert.
Wind energy reminds me of an Edsel owner that keeps fabricating parts, adding parts, repainting, rebranding and insisting that the car is the ‘best one ever made”. He keeps an SUV in the garage for those times the Edsel fails (which is over 50%) and yet keeps trying to sell everyone on the belief that his Edsel is the BEST ever way to travel. It’s some kind of delusion, unless you through in the government giving him huge checks yearly for preserving and promoting the car. It’s still wrong and the car is complete disaster, but his motivation of money at least is typical. Without it, it’s amazing the deal would sell to anyone. Yet, wind does, so who can tell?
[Rather, a Model T? .mod]
Hey, stop picking on the Edsel. We owned one for a while (a couple years I think) when I was a kid. It was an excellent car, although there was the time we were driving down the highway, and the steering wheel came off. I was in the front seat, so my mother, who was driving, handed it to me.
You got it fixed or trashed the Edsel??
Model T, Jugo, Pinto, Gremlin—Substitute your own favorite for worst car into the narrative.
http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
This site gives 2.5W/sq metre as the energy density for offshore wind around UK.
Average capacity factor 36.9%.
Not clear if the energy density uses the nameplate capacity or it includes the capacity factor
Nameplate is the maximum output power it is an absolute all other factors including average capacity go down from there. The 2.5W/sqm includes the average capacity factor of 30% it’s basically what you expect to get. The easier way to express it is 2.5 Million Watts per square kilometer.
Thanks for clarifying that. But notice there is no more onshore wind allowed in UK, it will all be offshore going forward, and the capacity factor will be higher than the 30% or 25% some on here assume. The 2016 UK offshore average was 37%.
Question. How many windmills will it take to stop clear cutting forests on other continents for British vanity and appearances?
Similarly, after 1994, it as difficult to find a White person in South Africa who supported Apartheid. We should not be surprised by this. Paradigms die when support for it erodes from within, then comes the collapse. At present, there is less and less support for the Western consumptive way of life, in the West. The tolerance of “renewables” is part of a desire to get out of the current paradigm and enter “something different”, Frustrations about all sorts of things, but especially a loss of faith and trust in government, lead people to ‘try anything’ that looks different, even if it is accepted that it will not be better. Frustration is a combination of expectations and observations, in short, un-met expectations.
Apartheid was stupid and most people knew it but feared any alternative and feared any loss of control. Consider how people feel about decades of government corruption in the communist and capitalist worlds. The average person is not content about it and does not plan to ‘join the system’ to ‘get ahead’. They want to live in a just and fair world and are not getting it, therefore: un-met expectations. So anything that comes along that has a modicum of reasonableness is grasped, one after the other, hoping for a better outcome.
Renewable energy sounds like a really good idea. Who could be against something that is ‘renewable’ forever? What the public are generally denied is the information and tools needed to make a thorough analysis of whether the promise is matched by the reality.
If we were all hunters for our food, and this poor bird was killed by a shotgun, what would we do? Ban hunting? Ban hunters? Ban birds? Ban food? It is surprising to me how many would vote for banning humans. That is true self-loathing.
One shouldn’t attribute actions to malignancy when stupidity is a perfectly good explanation. In my experience politicians cannot handle numbers when it comes to physical quantities (not that they are that good with money on a large scale).
I suspect that most of the politicians’ ideas are based on inumerate wishful thinking.
“It’s manipulated because you don’t like it? Really, how foolish a comment is that?”
Pictures are always being manipulated to present a positive or negative view. My favorite view of a nuke plant has a sail boat in the foreground.
If you are promoting that you environmentally friendly you need a picture of a single wind turbine with a dairy cow grazing on green grass. If you look in the tables of a power company annual report, you would think they are in the business of making power with coal but not one picture of a coal pile. The picture of the coal pile and power plant stacks depicting water vapor as pollution are provided by Friends of the Earth.
Griff seemed to be implying that their was actual photoshop manipulation of the picture, which is what my comment addressed. I am well aware of how one photographs angles and lighting to make an area look better or worse. I have posted pictures on my blog showing just that—how to make turbines look naughty or nice with proper photographic techniques (no photoshopping). I have also had a person accuse me of lying with a photo because it didn’t look like the picture of the deer on the hillside under a wind turbine but rather it was on an open prairie area and that made it look bad. I should not use anything but nice photos or I was a bad person, I guess. The turbines really were on prairie land, but that did not seem to matter.
I think it has at least been shot so as to make the turbines look crowded together
Griff: Okay, I’ll go with photo angle, but that’s not the same as manipulated.
They forgot to mention that windpower is increasingly put off-shore.
Also forgot to mention it still costs about half of what nuclear costs. Not saying nuclear isn’t needed, but Wind could off-set the need for nuclear, especially if it is deployed with shared battery storage and solar.
Actually the “professors” calculation neglects any kind of analysis of peak vs off-peak use, so grid loading during low-load periods doesn’t seem to enter the analysis. Funny, most electric cars are charged overnight – so his math is WAY off.
Typical.
The energy power required to charge a Tesla car “S” type is 100 KWh
Usually people want to charge their electric car when they are sleeping, during night. Then the photovoltaïc panels are useless.
Or they charge them at work, while at the supermarket or during a break in a motorway journey.
Or at station car park when commuting.
Or IKEA
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/28/ikea-locations-norway-feature-ev-fast-charging-stations/
Do you say that photovoltaic panels are NOT useless during night?
Maybe instead if building all those new bird slayers to move cars without fossil fuels, they should build a bunch of trebuchets and nets along the roads to hurl the car from one spot to another. Maybe stick a windmill on top to rewind it?
(Josh, you listening?)
So petrol stations will disappear from Scotland because they will be uneconomical. Bad luck if you want to drive your gas guzzler from England, or anywhere else for that matter, for a tour of Sctoland
Anyone have a link to the original study?
Do birds die in oil and gas production or shipping? Seems like I’ve seen studies about the number of birds that die at drilling operations on land, and processing plants at tar-sands where there are large pits with toxic stuff…
We need about 100TWh per year (as an order of magnitude) to run UK cars and taxis.
At offshore wind output =2.5MW/sq km (this includes the capacity factor), we need 4566 sq km of offshore wind.
That’s a square 68 km (roughly 42 miles) on a side.
Calculation for people to check: (2.5E+06 W/km^2) x (24 h) x (365 d/yr) = 2.19E+10 Wh/km^2/yr
Then (100E+12 Wh/yr) / (2.19E+10 Wh/km^2/yr) = 4566 km^2
1. What are you assuming for a capacity factor on those windmills?
2. Actual delivered electricity averages 17-19% for offshore turbines over their lifetime. But actual delivered power varies between 100% (3% of the tie) to 0.00% (20% of the time.) What will you do for transportation when the entire region is stagnant for 8-10 days and nights? People will starve, die for no medicines, no care, no food, no supplies and no work, no goods and services?
(1) The capacity factor is built-in already -in the power per unit area figure of 2.5W/sq metre.
(2) The average capacity factor for all UK offshore wind was 36.9% in 2016. Are you saying 2016 was exceptionally windy?
The stagnation factor: the wind is always blowing somewhere. Especially off the north west coast of Britain. Anyway, my figure of 100TWh per year includes a small allowance for electrical storage inefficiency (20 TWh). If you think it should be larger, it’s no problem we just scale up the area in in proportion.
Wind turbines must stand apart from each other for a certain distance not to interfere with each other. There are also legal restrictions as how close these turbines or parks may be to populated areas or even houses. So the space needed becomes larger than expected.
In 1978, my mailman offered a recommendation to solve the energy crisis: instead of running electricity to ground after it powers a device, why not return it to a battery or the grid? Why do we just throw it away?
I didn’t know where to start with a response. I’m not a good teacher – especially when one starts from such a deficit of knowledge.
Hey, Griff, were you delivering mail in 1978?
Hey, I have your mail in the van… I’ve been meaning to deliver it…
“SCOTLAND would need to be entirely covered by wind farms in order to power all of Britain’s electric cars, ”
Might as well. We don’t need Scotland for anything else.
Not even whisky?
Area of Scotland is 77,933 km^2 (Wikipedia)
Wind power area required is 4566 km^2, let’s round that up to 5000 km^2. That is 6.4% the area of Scotland.
On top of that, all new UK wind power will be offshore. It won’t be built on Scotland, it will be in the sea.
There are some serious issues with the electric vehicle plans, someone said, correctly, we have chosen to go to the moon now all we need is the NASA to make it happen.
These articles, with basic arithmetical and factual errors, do nothing for your cause, and in fact undermine it by exposing it to ridicule.
For heavens sake start getting someone half competent to check the arithmetic and the facts before they are posted.
How many cars on the streets are the basis of this calculation? Didn’t he consider taking in his calculation the amount of lithium required to build the necessary batteries? Is there enough Li availabe at all?