Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s an interesting and authoritative new [commenters pointed out it’s from 2012, I can’t find any newer research] study on the lifespan of those ugly bird-and-bat-choppers yclept “wind turbines”. It’s called “The Performance of Wind Turbines in the United Kingdom and Denmark“.
Here’s the Executive Summary, all emphasis is mine:
Executive Summary
1. Onshore wind turbines represent a relatively mature technology, which ought to have achieved a satisfactory level of reliability in operation as plants age. Unfortunately, detailed analysis of the relationship between age and performance gives a rather different picture for both the United Kingdom and Denmark with a significant decline in the average load factor of onshore wind farms adjusted for wind availability as they get older. An even more dramatic decline is observed for offshore wind farms in Denmark, but this may be a reflection of the immaturity of the technology.
2. The study has used data on the monthly output of wind farms in the UK and Denmark reported under regulatory arrangements and schemes for subsidising renewable energy. Normalised age-performance curves have been estimated using standard statistical techniques which allow for differences between sites and over time in wind resources and other factors.
3. The normalised load factor for UK onshore wind farms declines from a peak of about 24% at age 1 to 15% at age 10 and 11% at age 15. The decline in the normalised load factor for Danish onshore wind farms is slower but still significant with a fall from a peak of 22% to 18% at age 15. On the other hand for offshore wind farms in Denmark the normalised load factor falls from 39% at age 0 to 15% at age 10. The reasons for the observed declines in normalised load factors cannot be fully assessed using the data available but outages due to mechanical breakdowns appear to be a contributory factor.
4. Analysis of site-specific performance reveals that the average normalised load factor of new UK onshore wind farms at age 1 (the peak year of operation) declined significantly from 2000 to 2011. In addition, larger wind farms have systematically worse performance than smaller wind farms. Adjusted for age and wind availability the overall performance of wind farms in the UK has deteriorated markedly since the beginning of the century.
5. These findings have important implications for policy towards wind generation in the UK. First, they suggest that the subsidy regime is extremely generous if investment in new wind farms is profitable despite the decline in performance due to age and over time. Second, meeting the UK Government’s targets for wind generation will require a much higher level of wind capacity – and, thus, capital investment – than current projections imply. Third, the structure of contracts offered to wind generators under the proposed reform of the electricity market should be modified since few wind farms will operate for more than 12–15 years.
Not much more that I can say after that most devastating indictment of wind turbines. In a mere ten years, the UK wind farms are producing less than half of what they produced when they were new.
So … why do people still want to build wind farms in the UK? The simple answer is … subsidies. The UK populace is getting royally screwed by their government with its insane subsidies. Here’s an example, the subsidies for some of the largest solar plants in the UK:
I’m sure that you noticed the oddity … in each and every case, the government subsidy is more than the value of the energy produced … I gotta say, that’s dumber than cubical ball bearings.
Now, the UK government did get smart and end onshore wind subsidies … so of course, there are lots of people screaming and pressuring the government to lift the ban on the subsidies. From the Guardian:
The wind industry said if a bar on onshore windfarm subsidies was lifted it would allow the construction of 794 projects which have won consent through the planning system and are ready to build.
Yeah, I bet it would allow construction. Throwing big piles of money at construction projects tends to do that. The most significant point is this:
Without subsidies, nobody is building windfarms in the UK …
The total cost of UK subsidies for renewables is stunning. Renewable subsidies in the UK in 2016, the most recent data I could find, is just under £5 billion with a “b” UK pounds (US$ 6,000,000,000). And since the start of the subsidies in 2003 up until 2016, the total spent is £23 billion with a “b” pounds (US$28,000,000,000).
And what did they get for that £23 billion? From 2003 to 2016, UK renewables generated about 242 terawatt-hours of electricity. This means that the renewable subsidies have been 9.7 UK pence per kilowatt-hour (kWhr) (11.6 US cents per kWhr).
Here is the truly tragic part. The UK subsidy of 11.6 US cents per kWhr is about 10% more than the current US retail electricity price of about 10.7 cents per kWhr … so the UK consumer is paying more in renewable subsidies than the US consumer pays retail for its electricity.
Now the US is not without fault in this matter. However, our renewable subsidies are much smaller, only 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour … bad, but not outrageous.
TL;DR version?
Solar and wind power are worse than useless. Useless would be bad enough, but they are also horrendously expensive, and subsidies make it worse. The UK population pays more in renewable electricity subsidies per kilowatt-hour than the US pays retail for electricity. And to add insult to injury … the windmills are failing faster than anyone but work-hardened cynics like myself would have imagined.
Best to all from our home on the hillside, where from my window I see the cat out hunting in the evening summer grass and the sea wind is bringing us tantalizing hints of its oceanic home …
w.
DATA: UK Renewable Subsidies
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I just posted a defense of Mr. Watts following a vicious personal attack made upon him at American Weather……here is there attack, “In the end, Mr. Watts, who has no background in climate science, much less the study of glaciers, reached an unsupported conclusion that has no foundation in the scientific literature. It is pure opinion spiced with baseless speculation. Its purpose is not to inform, but to mislead.”
the conclusion that volcano activity could contribute to the glacier is indeed supported by the simple FACT Iceland is on a highly active volcano area.
If that was about the Ok glacier, that guy needs to be aware that last year was the first time in a quarter century that the 4 largest glaciers in Iceland stopped shrinking; 2 of them actually grew, one quite a bit. A glaciologist said it was because the 2018 summer was unusually colder. Ok lost its glacier status 5 years ago, so he needs to get up to speed. I can provide a link if desired.
Not only that but it is supposed to be only 700 years old, so prior to the 700 years when CO2 was around 300ppm why wasn’t the Glacier there before that?
CAGW? 750 years ago…….😂
But didn’t you guys know? Wind turbines are 100% made from hemp! And the energy used to design, build, transport, erect and maintain them is generated by converting the matter contained in hemp directly into energy using the method discovered by Tesla but buried by the shape-changing alien reptiles of the oil industry!
Sorry, feeling a bit frisky today…
The official cost of subsidies is here:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/cost-of-green-subsidies-rises-to-66bn-in-next-5-years/
Excluding the minor costs of insulation, the cost of green subsidies is £11.4bn this year, about £400 per household.
I agree with you. “Cubical ball bearings”!
Unfortunately, the Government is keen on wind turbines – after all, the wind is free!
Thanks, Richard. There’s an old sailor’s maxim that goes:
w.
Wind and solar power industries consume more energy in their operations than they can ever produce with their monstrous turbines and solar panels. That’s why they always lose money without massive government subsidies or set-asides, regardless of the price of fossil fuels. And that’s without holding them accountable for their environmental devastation of wildlife habitat destruction and the slaughter of millions of birds and bats each year. That also doesn’t account for the cost of cleaning up their toxic waste messes. Rest assured that wherever a wind or solar toxic waste site is being cleaned up, they are using fossil fuel powered vehicles and equipment.
And the US is plunging onward with off-shore wind farms in New England. I have read that prices are expected to be about 23.5 cents/kWhr (includes delivery charges,taxes, etc.) to the consumer.
A number of folks pointed out that the study is 7 years old … however, I just took a look and haven’t found anything newer on the subject.
w.
Willis Eschenbach
August 20, 2019 at 11:39 am
Yes, it’s a pity that it’s so old but…c’est la vie! You have to work with the data available and thanks for the analysis.
Presumably the current generation of wind turbines has learnt from previous ones so would be more reliable, even if they would probably be bigger. Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?
How do they plan to recycle the fibreglass blades? There must be a plan?
They go to Landfill.
They dig 600 foot long trenches and bury them – where they do anything at all.
I found this on Google Scholar
http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/32644/1/70021_Editorial%20SS%20renewable%20Energy%20%20%20version%202_cleanSeptember.pdf
It reviews a conference discussing ways to detect faults and predict senescence of wind turbines. What struck me was that engineers are only now looking for ways to diagnose faults before catastrophic failure. In general, the entries in GS are mostly on the same problem.
Hi Willis
You could try the link I provided upthread, it’s a paper from 2014.
You are getting your data from anti-windfarm lobby group the Renewable Energy Foundation. You need to do better than that if you want to persuade outside of the echo chamber. Your numbers are just not credible: for example :
‘From 2003 to 2016, UK renewables generated about 242 terawatt-hours of electricity.’
The majority of the subsidy is from the Renewables Obligation, government statistics show renewable electricity under this scheme amounted to 386 TWh for 2010-2016 alone.
Source : https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-section-6-renewables
Spreadsheet ET.6
Thanks, P. Clarke. Actually my data is not from the “Renewable Energy Foundation”. It is from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, available as an excel spreadsheet from here.
My figures are for the total renewable energy generated by wind and solar, as (AFAIK) those are the only ones getting big subsidies from the UK Government.
w.
My figures are for the total renewable energy generated by wind and solar, as (AFAIK) those are the only ones getting big subsidies from the UK Government.
No, just under 40% of the main subsidy vehicle, the Renewables Obligation goes to other types of generation. Here’s the list:
Biogas from anaerobic digestion
Biomass
Combined Heat and Power (CHP)
Hydro electric
Tidal power
Wind power
Photovoltaic cells
Landfill gas
Sewage gas
Wave power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewables_Obligation_(United_Kingdom)#Types_of_energy_eligible
I think this is one time where the phrase ‘It’s much worse than we thought’ is justified.
“If You Want Renewable Energy, Get Ready to Dig”, August 5 article in Wall Street Journal, by Mark Mills, cites the actual costs of the non-renewables that go into making wind turbines:
Plastic?
Actually Carbon Fibre.
Well, plastic burns pretty well…..
Yeah, I know….
I’m a reliability engineer working in electrical and electromechanical product development for over 3 decades. It should be no surprise if capacity factor declines due to increased maintenance requirements and that lifetime may be limited to no more than 15 years. Just imagining the bearing loads, for example, both static and dynamic has always made me wonder. I’ll bet the dynamic loads are all but impossible to model or simulate, and with a wide variety of operating conditions extensive field testing unlikely to uncover end-of-life issues. This would be especially true in the rush to get and maintain market share in an environment where government intervention practically created a huge worldwide market overnight.
The products I work on are nothing on the scale of a commercial wind turbine, although my company does offer a 25 year full replacement warranty, which is kinda crazy and keeps me constantly thinking about better ways to do reliability design and verification. But I’m under no illusions that we don’t have to build some factor into our product pricing that takes wearout into account. I fully expect that has been done only rarely, if at all, in the rush to build wind power generators and grid-scale wind farms. Regardless, grid-scale wind and solar are folly no matter how you look at it.
As regards operating conditions, off-shore wind turbines are subjected to sea water spray, which is pretty corrosive to any type of machinery. Off-shore has higher maintainance costs because of this inconvenient truth and are more difficult to get to.
Kerry says:
Just imagining the bearing loads, for example, both static and dynamic has always made me wonder.
Yes, and wind turbine bearings are overhung w/a huge load, which are particularly tough conditions.
The normalised load factor for UK onshore wind farms declines from a peak of about 24% at age 1 to 15% at age 10 and 11% at age 15. The decline in the normalised load factor for Danish onshore wind farms is slower but still significant with a fall from a peak of 22% to 18% at age 15. On the other hand for offshore wind farms in Denmark the normalised load factor falls from 39% at age 0 to 15% at age 10.
As a retired power plant PE engineer, I shake my head in wonder at these low numbers. Such miserable load factors are being promoted as the answer to meet current/future power requirements???? Are the people promoting these things totally clueless? I’d have to say yes, they are. Pretty much all the the 40+ yr old coal plants (20+ units) on the utility I worked for had at least 90% availability factors (some weren’t run as much as in the past as their costs were no longer as favorable as newer plants) & 80% + capacity factors for those still w/favorable low costs.
No, not clueless. Coining it. That’s why they are rich and we are poor.
JF
The “trougherati.”
Are they cleaning the blades? Yano, one of those great, new green jobs. Bug goo on the blades can reduce wind power by 50%.
https://www.nature.com/articles/35083698
And Ice.
They have even used Helicopters for De-Icing.
Nothing new. In the 1940’s there was a lot of work expended on laminar-flow wings for aircraft, but this was ultimately abandoned, because just a few squashed bugs on the leading edge was enough to destroy the aerodyamic gain.
I fly fiberglass gliders with high aspect laminar flow wings. Before flying we try to clean the wings and horizontal stabilizer as carefully as possible. When we come back even the slightest speck of dust has caused a vee-shaped pattern the width of the chord. The more specs, the more turbulence in the laminar flow over the wing and the poorer performance of the glider. How often do they wax those turbine blades?
My guess is never.
Another profound kicker is that the taxpayer is going to be on the hook yet again when these unsightly monstrosities are no longer viable and have to be torn down. Pay in subsidies to construct and operate, pay again to tear down when they stop working and cost more to fix and operate than to tear down. Will any politicians be held responsible for wasting taxpayer monies? Answer: No, the ones responsible will be long gone, and won’t be available for comment.
Too bad about it being 7 years old. It certainly deserved being brought up again. Thank you.
Wind power is worse than we thought.
In looking for something more recent, I found this. Once again, emphasis mine:
Translation: if we use the wind to generate all our electricity, it will warm the US much more than the purported cooling due to reduced CO2 … go figure. I note also that their results are based on observational data, where the CO2 cooling is theoretical.
w.
good find.
“CO2 cooling is theoretical”
CO2 Warming is theoretical?
No, supposed cooling from the supposed reduction in CO2 from “converting” US electricity generation with wind is what is theoretical.
One probable reason for reducing performance is blade deterioration. Gliders use the same high performance wings, and their lift can be seriously degraded by pitting and dirt. I am wondering how often they clean and re-gelcoat those blades.
.
Another problem is that the UK has just suffered its first frequency instability blackout, with 5% of the nation going dark. This is the same failure as South Australia, where there is too little base-load to frequency for the renewables to synchronise with, and so they get destabilised and are thrown off the grid.
And yet the UK is still determined to close our nine remaining coal stations. This is despite the fact that we don’t have enough non-renewable backup, and frequency stability depends upon these base-load stations. The UK needs 15,000 gWhr of backup energy, and yet we only have 10 gWhr (at Dinorwig) and 500 mW of diesel generators (or 120 gWhr over ten days).
Ralph
Ralph, as always good to hear from you.
ralfellis August 20, 2019 at 12:43 pm Edit
True.
w.
ralfellis;
re cleaning and gel-coating the blades; never, and that’s just an estimate.
Isn’t it usual, to pay more for an high quality product ? /sarc
No directly relevant data here, but on p. 25 they do announce that they have decided to sell off their U.S. renewable generation assets.
https://www.sempra.com/sites/default/files/content/files/node-page/file-list/2019/2018-corporate-sustainability-report-semprav2.pdf
SDG&E is a subsidiary. This means that Sempra has sold off the generating capacity which currently supplies about 45% of its subsidiary’s consumption, and would have supplied 60% by the required date. That does not look to me like confidence in wind generation.
In contrast, this 2014 paper suggests a 1.6% degradation per year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148113005727
Ralph
Hey, didn’t the Dutch empire start to go down the tubes around the same time they reached peak installed wind power?
I never connected those dots until reading Willis’s commentary today.
Have a look at this opening page of Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
https://www.brkenergy.com/energy/wind
There seems to be a great disconnect.
If the decline/failure of wind turbines is a general thing and well known, how is it that public companies do not report this in the annual statements?
One might expect Warren Buffett’s comments at the annual gig in Omaha to include a questioning of the long term viability of this part of BH’s holdings.
On a slightly different note: Individuals and small cities that go the wind route seem to experience failures beyond their abilities. Maybe there is some minimum number (a scale thing) needed to absorb the decline/failures.
In the Keynesian formulation of GDP, government spending, regardless of how wasteful is added to the final product. Climate Hoi Polloi doesn’t care about the efficiencies of the final product. They care about the political outcome of the process.
So for all the work that went into this article it fundamentally misses the key drivers of climate debate which is political not technocratic. Many of the usual skeptic ostriches are in the comment section applauding this road to nowhere approach.
Meanwhile the Greenshirts feature pictures of dead fish and fraud temperature claims one after the other, daily. This is how you expect to survive their plans?
Cwon14,
Agree, facts about renewables don’t matter. Many of those commenting on these pages wish for a more current analysis to determine just exactly how much less than worthless wind power is. Why? It’s already proven beyond any reasonable doubt that is an expensive waste of capital. Who should pay for the research? A conservative think tank? No, because no matter what the findings it would be labeled a propaganda flyer from Exxon and the Koch Brothers. The same voters that elect the AOC’s of the world would say, “I thought so, they can’t fool me, wind and solar power is “free”. The last time I looked the only person of influence expressing a dislike of wind “power” is President Trump. And even he has to support ethanol, which is even worse than wind, so that he polls will in Iowa, the wind and ethanol state ….the first state to caucus in the presidential nomination process.
My broader point is that this is typical skeptical debate self destruction. Focusing on trivia, which part of the WUWT protocol, rather then the essential political underpinnings that divide skeptics is why incoherent opposition to green globalism fails.
If logic settled politics there would be no democratic party at all.
Disagree.
This is how we keep ourselves informed.
This is not trivial, it is major.
It has resulted, all by itself, in a huge cost for every man woman and child in the industrialized world, and this is just the beginning of what they have in mind for this insane waste of money and ecological disaster in the making.
Entire countries have seen power bills quadruple, while reliable sources of power are being decommissioned, and the net effect on the one thing they are trying to achieve, reduction of CO2 production, is net zero, and perhaps even positive in places.
And in the process of quadrupling power costs, they have spent hundreds of billions on projects that involved chopping down forests, blighting landscapes, killing wildlife, and most probably causing health and quality of life issues for millions of people.
Killing every bird on the planet for a useless gesture that robs us blind is hardly trivial.
Nicholas,
The problem in is in central planning and irrational political cultures. When you frame the debate on those facts skeptics, actual skeptics, some resistance and push back is achieved. Climate change is an evolution of the broader Greenshirt movements of the 60’s and even earlier. Without that context the debate on details and data is pointless.
It’s primary politics over science about 10 to 1.
The issue is that skeptics come in many forms, many wish to deny the political reality for the safety of mundane spaghetti charts and nuanced cost benefits discussions. There is no science proof at all that the human input of co2, perhaps less then 3% of total input, has any impact on the climate at all. So if it was about empirical reason the climate movement would have died long ago. Climate change and “green” in general is an emotionally based cultural and political framing of issues.
So you want to consider the blight of misbegotten wind investments? That’s not going to convince the hardcore green left of anything. The abstraction of AGW is religious in scale and scope. What ever is REAL is always dwarfed by the virtuous ideals of green culture. They’ll tell how 50 trillion really isn’t enough to create Utopia, they can’t resolve who is actually going to benefit by the crony effort but they include themselves as beneficiaries fighting for justice. So you think focusing on a 7 year old cost/benefit report about wind power is going to move the debate needle? Skeptics who think this, there are many, are the equivalent Charlie Brown letting Lucy hold the football for the 10000th time.
The reason for being on the losing side, which I’m definitely on with this crew of obtuse skepticism, is to try to win and put off a little longer the seemingly inevitable Orwellization of the world at large. The skeptical consensus has to evolve to a corresponding political offset to the climate change movement, which is politically rooted. It has to reject the basic folly of validating what hasn’t been proven by classical science methodology by constantly reinforcing climate beliefs in debate as if it has actual proofed science results. So once it’s grasped the imagined “science” consensus is actually a political and crony belief system skeptics again make gains.
The further fact that the Audubon Society and many other naturalists have abandoned concern for habitats consumed by wind for the sake of co2 reduction that can’t be quantified in results should illustrate how trivial the premise of the article is in political practice.
A political argument can only be won politically. Many skeptics simply can’t accept that reality as it conflicts with their world views, they have more in common with climate promoters in many cases and represent a fifth column is the broader struggle. In itself there is no harm to this presentation and it illustrates malinvestment. In another way it represents the chronic distraction of thinking climate change debates are more complex then the political underpinning, that is harmful.
On the subject of long-term costs, what are the economics of hybrid diesel-electric buses? They were very popular in the UK for a while but now they are being replaced by micro-hybrids with much smaller batteries. My guess is that the cost of replacing the battery in a full hybrid is almost as much as the cost of a new bus. Any comments?
My guess that is that big batteries for a full-size bus cost way more due to the much smaller demand and the difficulties engineering a big battery. Cooling, cell balancing, the large number of cells required, cost of replacing cells, etc.
YAY! that means the .GOV will want to cut down MY forest to put up turbines in the near future. I had been worried I missed that gravy train.