Promoting wind is a political agenda that is divorced from real facts and science.
By John Droz Jr.
Trying to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.
1 – Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications, well over a hundred years ago. Even in the late 1800s it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs for power. When we throw the switch, we expect that the lights will go on – 100% of the time. It’s not possible for wind energy, by itself, to EVER do this, which is one of the main reasons it was relegated to the archival collection of antiquated technologies (along with such other inadequate energy sources as horse and oxen power).
2 – Fast forward to several years ago. With politicians being convinced that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was an imminent catastrophic threat, lobbyists launched campaigns to favor anything that would purportedly reduce carbon dioxide. This was the marketing opportunity that the wind energy business needed. Wind energy was resurrected from the dust bin of power sources, as its promoters pushed the fact that wind turbines did not produce CO2 while generating electricity.
3 – Of course, that just by itself would not have been a significant incentive, so the original wind development lobbyists then made the case for a quantum leap: that by adding wind turbines to the grid we could significantly reduce CO2 from those “dirty” fossil fuel electrical sources (especially coal). This argument became the basis for many states implementing a Renewable Energy Standard (RES) or Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Those undemocratic standards mandated that the state’s utilities use (or purchase) a prescribed amount of wind energy (“renewables”), by a set date.
Why was a mandate necessary? Simply because the real world reality of integrating wind energy made it a very expensive option. As such, no utility companies would normally do this on their own. They had to be forced to. For more on the cost, please keep reading.
4 – Interestingly, although the stated main goal of these RES/RPS programs was to reduce CO2, not a single state’s RES/RPS requires verification of CO2 reduction from any wind project, either beforehand or after the fact. The politicians simply took the sales peoples’ word that consequential CO2 savings would be realized!
5 – It wasn’t too long before utility companies and independent energy experts calculated that the actual CO2 savings were miniscule (if any). This was due to the inherent nature of wind energy, and the realities of necessarily continuously balancing the grid, on a second-by-second basis, with fossil-fuel-generated electricity (typically gas). The frequently cited Bentek study (How Less Became More) is a sample independent assessment of this aspect. More importantly, there has been zero scientific empirical proof provided by the wind industry to support their claims of consequential CO2 reduction.
Studies cited by the wind industry (about wind energy’s CO2 savings) are almost always computer models. As a person who has written some 100,000 lines of code, I can assure you that it’s easy to make a model that “proves” that pigs can fly. Models may be appropriate where there is no actual data. Since there are a few hundred thousand turbines in operation worldwide, there is empirical data. If CO2 is genuinely being saved, the wind industry should be able to show real data.
6 – Apparently suspecting that the CO2 deception would soon be exposed, the wind lobbyists took pre-emptive action, and added another rationale to prop up their case: energy diversity. However, since our electricity system already had considerable diversity (and many asked “more diversity at what cost?”) this hype never gained much traction. Back to the drawing board….
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Maybe one day solar and wind can replace fossil fuels, but that day is far away.
What will replace FF someday is more likely to be some type of nuclear power. Solar and wind may work in certain circumstances, but I doubt they will ever prove useful for the grid.
I can tell you EXACTLY when that will be – the day when humans revert to caveman life styles and no longer require electricity.
The green movement is down with that
Windmills are still green prayer wheels, intermittent and nondispatchable. BTW I’ve been driving since 1972, and have hit one bird (a crow eating roadkill), and two deer.
Someone should do a little research about the cost per Kwh of peaker plant integration… Don’t know the specifics, but, feedstock is the highest cost component natural gas generation. It’s a big exogenous variable not addressed in LCOE comparative analysis of wind and solar model relative to other generation sources.
Peaker plants are the least efficient type of natural gas generation, and, I believe were 50% of all Name Plate Rated installation in the US last year.
And, one has to set aside capital that could be invested elsewhere (if the farm is investor and not utility owned) to cover generation lulls periods so the mortgage can be paid.
All solar and wind models are full of exogenous variables, which, are costs. High costs.
excuse the typos!
Making up a list silly reasons to be against something is not the same as actually doing something. For every way of producing power, there is such a list. My way was using heat from fission.
Basically the lights would go out if the lists had any merit. The fact is to produce power requires a long list of reason to get it done.
In the US, providing is a public service. If some of the public wants alternatives then live with it. It is not all that hard to accomplish. Of course there are a reason they are alternatives.
Coal, gas, and nuclear are the primary choices power producers have. This provides the luxury politicians making bad choices.
We banned coal up here in Ontario instead of putting scrubbers on the plants. Costs of electricity doubled. They had already increased before that because of all the subsidies on intermittent renewables.
So Alan can you put a number on the increased cost?
I only ask because it sounds like you are a little loose with your facts. Canada is a different country but like most in the US on the subject of electric power, they are very ignorant.
When we lived in Virginia and scrubbers were added, the cost went up a little over 2 cents. When considering the generating cost, the cost doubled.
Of course this shows up as a capital improvement not a fuel cost. Unfortunately, this drove the aluminum industry out of Ohio. The aluminum industry is mostly gone from Washington State too.
Correlation is not causation.
Very mysterious why Canada would be worried about the Earth becoming slightly warmer.
It is mostly way too cold and mostly very high above sea level.
Warmistas, apparently, can sell ice cubes to Eskimos.
Go figure.
“2 – Fast forward to several years ago. With politicians being convinced that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was an imminent catastrophic threat, lobbyists launched campaigns …”
But before that there was a wind turbine craze in the 80s and earlier that was even more outrageously impractical, wasn’t there? (Documentation isn’t on the Internet yet, so we don’t know enough about it.)
The danger to wildlife of the urrent equipment is intollerable. Those who want to promote wind energy first need to come up with a method that does not endanger wildlife. Using wind energy for the direct generation of electricity has a major problem with the varability in the wind. There may be other tasks llike the pumping of water and charging up of batteries that could make economic use of such a unreliable source of energy. Just 200 years ago, wind power was very important to travel on the oceans but even in this application it was very unreliable. I can understand research to find a safe and economic means of making use of wind power but we are not there yet. Full deployment of wind power should not take place until economic solutions to the wind power problem has been found.
Near the San Grogonio Pass in Sourthern California near where I live, they created extensive wind farms. But for at least a while, most of the wind turbans appeared not to be functioning because of maintance problems and of course none of them worked when the wind was not blowing. It was only because of subsidies and tax breaks that they were ever constructed in the first place.
The whole article is excellent. I do wish people would us all metric units.
I think my neighbor’s new SUV gets about 3 whales per Roman amphora quadrantal.
Metric units has seen the dumbing down of our children, they no longer have to think.In OZ we have had metrics since the early 1970ties. I am now in my eight decade and building stuff in metric it easy to make mistakes on tapes and rulers because it all looks the same with little delineation. I never make mistakes using running inches on a tape or ruler, old eyes. You can keep your metric.
When I was growing up and a young machinist, I had to convert drawings in metric to machines that were imperial. But I did like working to +/- 2 microns tho.
Wayne
Interesting perspective. I heard about a spring making factory in Butterworth where the made Mack Truck springs. The cutter was told to cont two tons of spring blades 1.4m long. That was the first error. In Germany they use millimeters and I adopted that long ago. Absolutely everything is written in mm. So the cutter dutifully cut the steel 1 metre and 4 centimetres because that was the first 4 on the tape. 1.04m is not 1.4m.
Oops.
The only way to survive in the metric age is to use mm, and not the US slight, vague leaning towards cm as ‘little inches’. The Germans got it right and there is no confusion.
Patrick: 2 microns would be taking a chance on a hand operated lathe. But Gr2 machinists have to turn to 25 microns (meaning, +-12.5) to get their certificate or I wouldn’t sign their papers. I think 2 microns absolute requires a temperature controlled room, right?
Patrick, in the power plant (it had a machine-shop of course), we regularly used the “mil” (thousandth of an inch), for the tiny measurements.
Things that are extremely hard to find on the Web:
– graph of wind production in power over time (not energy week by week)
– evolution of the rate of MS vs. the use of the hep B vaccines
– rapes in Europe vs. “migrants”
I wonder why..
http://gridwatch.org.uk
That’s why the site was created. To examine and quantify the meme of ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’
6 years of power production statistics available to download.
http://vps.templar.co.uk/Cartoons%20and%20Politics/model%20turbine.jpg
Wind energy is a joke
http://vps.templar.co.uk/Cartoons%20and%20Politics/model%20turbine.jpg
I still think that fields of wind turbines must be disrupting airflow around the globe – if all the wind turbines in the world were aligned and opposite to earth’s rotation would the world slow down?
Good grief! I thought of this one last night.
All that man-induced friction will slightly slow the Earth’s rotation. Setting off more earthquakes than fracking does. Some time ago the rotation rate was 22 hours, now at 24–what’s next?
🙂
24.001
Can I add one more “concern”. Warmists kep telling us how sensitive the climate is – the buttery fly wing in the amazon causing a hurricane half a world away type sensitive. So how much do we change the climate by taking a few gigawatts of energy out of the wind system. It will slow down the wind which can have far from trivial consequences. Quite seriously, I suspect this is going to become a massive unintended consequence.
This article is misleading.
Wind energy really got going after the 1970s oil crisis – not for commercial production, but as a gimik for the eco movement and particularly the anti-nuclear movement.
Wind started growing in Denmark, oddly sharing its facilities with the nuclear research centre – because it was a sop to ecos to keep them quiet on nuclear. Unfortunately for us, the Danes hit upon a very effective scheme to use the paltry sum given to this eco-fad to not only create get a lot of people owning windmills – and so support but the money also created a reasonably healthy industry with enough financial clout to start lobbying heavily.
But that industry then nearly died a death when the USSR ended and anti-nuclear groups stopped getting funded.
But it had a savour – in the 1970s, we passed a lot of pollution reducing legislation. SO2 is a known coolant, and from 1970-2000 we saw warming (not unexpected if you know the cooling effect of SO2).
However, with the growth of anti-industry and anti-capitalist movements in academia, etc., that was all we needed to get “CO2 caused global warming” – and academia, the NGOS, the media and government all jumped on the “global warming doomsday” bandwagon, and the rest is well known.
Perhaps it did start in Europe in the 1970’s — don’t know. Certainly didn’t get significantly going in the US/Canada until massive subsidies were made available — much later.
I said much the same in this article, back in 2004. It was reprinted in WUWT in 2009.
Renewable Energy, Our Downfall:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-–-our-downfall/
R
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/22/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-288/comment-page-1/#comment-2643835
[excerpt]
WHAT IS GRID-CONNECTED WIND POWER REALLY WORTH?
Wind power is intermittent and non-dispatchable and therefore should be valued much lower than the reliable, dispatchable power typically available from conventional electric power sources such as fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
In practice, one should assume the need for almost 100% conventional backup for wind power (in the absence of a hypothetical grid-scale “super-battery”, which does not exist in practical reality). When wind dies, typically on very hot or very cold days, the amount of wind power generated approaches zero.
Capacity Factor equals {total actual power output)/(total rated capacity assuming 100% utilization). The Capacity Factor of wind power in Germany equals about 28%*. However, Capacity Factor is not a true measure of actual usefulness of grid-connected wind power. The following paragraph explains why:
Current government regulations typically force wind power into the grid ahead of conventional power, and pay the wind power producer equal of greater sums for wind power versus conventional power, which artificially makes wind power appear more economic. This practice typically requires spinning backup of conventional power to be instantly available, since wind power fluctuates wildly, reportedly at the cube of the wind speed. The cost of this spinning backup is typically not deducted from the price paid to the wind power producer.
The true factor that reflects the intermittency of wind power Is the Substitution Capacity*, which is about 5% in Germany – a large grid with a large wind power component. Substitution Capacity 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. This is extremely uneconomic.
I SUGGEST THAT THE SUBSTITUTION CAPACITY OF ~5% IS A REASONABLE FIRST APPROXIMATION FOR WHAT WIND POWER IS REALLY WORTH – that is 1/20th of the value of reliable, dispatchable power from conventional sources. Anything above that 5% requires spinning conventional backup, which makes the remaining wind power redundant and essentially worthless.
This is a before-coffee first-approximation of the subject. Improvements are welcomed, provided they are well-researched and logical.
Regards, Allan
* Reference:
“E.On Netz excellent Wind Report 2005” at
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
Funny how wind power proponents always – ALWAYS – only quote the nameplate CAPACITY… E.g ‘COULD power x-thousand homes…etc…’
Here in what used to be the Democratic United Kingdom – I feel sorry for the good citizens of Brighton, on the South Coast. They used to have an uninterrupted view of the horizon out to sea – now they get to look at (I think) 140 turbines..
Still, they voted in the one Green MP in the House of Commons, so I suppose they’ve only got themselves to blame if the money-spending visitor count drops like a stone…
>>…added another rationale to prop up their case: energy diversity
Diversity for diversity’s sake – where have I heard that before?
“Diversity for diversity’s sake”
Biodiversity?
Should we keep with smallpox around?
Since the year 2000, industrial wind turbines have overtaken all other causes for mass mortality events for bats in North America and Europe. Millions of bats are killed each year at a time when mosquito populations are skyrocketing. Approximately twice as many bats are killed as birds, since bats are killed even if they only come near the blades due to rapid pressure changes. In the US, a conservative estimate of bat mortality indicates that at least 4 million bats have been killed by wind turbines since 2012. Bats are one of nature’s primary natural defenses for keeping mosquito populations in check. One bat can catch up to 1,000 mosquitoes in just one hour, likely several thousand in a night when mosquitoes are abundant. Scientists estimate that 90% of the hoary bat population could be lost to turbines in the next 50 years.
Along the eastern US most of the turbines are sited in the migratory flyways. Besides the millions of bats mentioned above many raptor species fly the length of the ridges where these wind turbines are installed. The true count of raptors killed is known only to the wind turbine operators as they self report with little oversight. If we as ordinary citizens killed or possessed raptors in the numbers killed we would go to prison. The Obama administration gave them a free to kill pass. Special interest money at work in America.
wind turbines
Again, this gives real turbines a bad name. You don’t call propeller-planes turbine planes. Only jet-planes use real (gas) turbines. So, again, wind energy comes from pinwheels — just larger versions of the children’s toys w/generators stuck on the end.
That all goes along with the solar lobby that touted solar jobs under Obama and then potential solar jobs lost under tariffs recently. Just so you know the truth, a majority of the solar jobs in the U.S. are tax credit mining on rooftops. The name of the game in competitive, best of breed utility scale solar is cost reduction in balance of system costs (labor) after major cost reductions in the panels. What solar panel production remains in the U.S. is in the process of exceptional automation from new investment to replace jobs or closure. The demise of Solar City concerned the declining market for rooftop installs in CA and lock out in NV. And when the early adopters of rooftop solar get around to component replacements, it will be in contrast to much more common and efficient utility scale and community scale solar. But then tax credit mining never had much to do with price comparison or efficiency or grid maintenance costs.
Re: Cars killing birds. I have been driving a car for…let’s see, 87 minus 12…75 years. Hit two cows, no birds.
JimB
@Scottish-Sceptic @Rud Istvan Today’s Newspaper
.. Chance to make UK wind sector a WORLD LEADER ..
by Julia King*, the UK’s Low Carbon Business Ambassador
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/baroness-brown-chance-to-make-uk-wind-sector-a-world-leader-1-9082426
Doh ! “UK could be world leader” = “UK taxpayers will probably be cash loser”
As pollies rush into as wishful think & splurge cash on making mistakes.
* JK was ex-head of Aston Uni, made Baroness of Cambridge, & #2 on the Committee on Climate Change. (A parliamentary committee which does a lot of harm to logic)
Did anyone see the item the other day, somewhere on UK TV about windturbines on the isle of Lewis?
“The locals are objecting to an EDF development of 35 turbines, good I thought they’ve enough already, but no it wasn’t that at all.
Apparently a community farm of three turbines earns the island about £1million a year (not sure if Harris benefits) and they want to built said development them selves.
Spread evenly between every family on Lewis will have a six figure annual income paid for in subsidies.
Perhaps the Brahan Seer got it right about people returning after the black rain, all those emigrants descendants coming back to claim long deserted crofts to have a share in the booty.”
Feb 4th
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/04/windfarm-crofters-lewis-fight-edf-wood-group-scottish
sorry mod, pls delete the double post