Wind/solar mandates are a costly fail, reports University of Chicago study

Did the company that manufactured the wind turbine make a profit? They manufactured the wind turbine and paid for all the inputs including the energy, and made a profit.

Did the electric company make a profit? They think they will or they wouldn’t pay to build the thing. On this point, Warren Buffet has said that they would not be profitable without the subsidy, so they are marginally profitable to the electric company.

I have to conclude that it is most likely that they do produce more energy than it takes to make them, otherwise no one would make a profit.

Capacity Factor (about 20+%) is not that relevant – Substitution Capacity (about 5%) is.

Source: E.On Netz – The biggest wind power generator in the world.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/26/are-studies-of-high-penetrations-of-wind-power-valid/#comment-2605685

WHAT IS GRID-CONNECTED WIND POWER REALLY WORTH? [GERMAN EXAMPLE]

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 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
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NOTES (Edited):

The excellent E-On Netz Wind Report 2005 (1) provides excellent information. See Figure 7 re Substitution Capacity.

Sadly, green energy is not green and produces little useful energy – intermittency and the lack of practical energy storage are the fatal flaws.

Germany has calculated that it needs 95% spinning backup of conventional energy (e.g. natural gas turbines) to support their wind power schemes – it would make much more economic sense to just scrap the wind power and use the gas turbines.

Driving up energy costs just increases winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor. Excess Winter Deaths in the UK this year totaled over 50,000, half the annual average 100,000 in the USA, which has FIVE times the population of the UK.

When politicians fool with energy policy, real people suffer and die. Most politicians are so scientifically illiterate they should not even opine on energy, let alone set policy.

Posterity will judge this climate/ green energy nonsense harshly, as the most costly and foolish scam in human history.
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REFERENCES:

1. “E.On Netz Wind Report 2005” at
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf

2. DEBATE ON THE KYOTO ACCORD
PEGG, reprinted in edited form at their request by several other professional journals, THE GLOBE AND MAIL and LA PRESSE in translation, by Baliunas, Patterson and MacRae, November 2002.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/KyotoAPEGA2002REV1.pdf

This is what we KNEW in 2002:
[excerpts from our Rebuttal in the APEGA debate}

“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”

“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”

Absolutely correct. The energy returned for energy invested in a 100% intermittents supplied network is less than 1.

Modern society and processes that we rely on require dispatchable power. All wind turbines do to an existing grid is add cost. All the existing dispatchable generating capacity is still required; often coal being replaced with fast response gas or diesel. The maintenance cost of dispatchables increase as their load cycles up and down more and there is little or no saving in fuel because they are operating at their optimum for shorter periods or coal is replaced by gas, which is usually more expensive than coal.

The only option to dispatchable fossil generation, to make use of intermittents, is huge storage capacity. The cost of adding storage plus the overbuild in intermittent capacity to minimise the overall system cost means that the generators can never supply more energy than is required to build, maintain and replace them over their life.

Non tracking solar panels achieve a natural capacity factor of about 16% in locations like California. When storage is taken into account, the constrained capacity factor drops to around 5%. If the solar generators are large scale then the transmission infrastructure has to increase by around 20 times to cater for the dispersed nature and the low achieved capacity factor.

The natural capacity factors for wind are usually a little higher than solar but the area required per unit of output makes them completely impractical to supply power in most of the populated areas on the globe. They also place a higher demand on storage capacity because wind can go missing for weeks at a time.

These issues are now becoming quite obvious in locations in Australia where intermittents have got above 10% of market share. For example, wholesale price of lunchtime power in Queensland goes negative on mild sunny days. That means the solar farms voluntarily curtail output at lunchtime to avoid sending money out with their electricity. In South Australia the lunchtime network demand on a Sunday in November this year could be negative; meaning SA rooftops will actually be supplying the total state demand plus some of the Victorian demand across the border. No grid scale generation will be required. They are aiming to have synchronous condensers installed to meet system stability requirements rather than having to have gas plant on line to achieve the stability requirement.

Those who do not understand power supply systems are being misled by the use of the term “renewable” instead of more appropriate term “intermittents” or “dirty intermittents” where the “dirty” is a commonly used term in power generation to refer to generators that lack inertia, have poor voltage regulation, varying output and high harmonic content. These weaknesses of intermittents need additional cost to provide compensation. The costs for frequency and voltage control in the South Australian network have skyrocketed in the last three years as more intermittent generating capacity has connected.