From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
More bad news for the wind industry:.
What is different about this one is that the PPA forces the wind farm to buy power on the spot market, when the wind does not provide enough:
In other words, the wind farm is obliged to pay the costs of its own intermittency. And, of course, when wind power is low, spot market prices rise.
This highlights the worthlessness of wind power, as when there is plenty of wind, the value of the product is low.
In this country it is energy consumers who have to pay the costs of intermittency, something which needs changing.
The consumer always pays, one way or another.
Yes. This simple truth eludes many and wind farms are just the tip of the iceberg for wasted money. A.k.a. lost opportunity.
That is true for money that has already been spent. It’s water under the bridge.
The trick is to avoid wasting the citizens’ money in the first place.
Making the windmill operators responsible for providing base load power is the way it should be. That way real competition is restored to the market place.
You miss ‘the trick” completely. As in the article on the Virginia elections, “the trick” is to insure that you, the politician/administrators get your cut of the crony capitalist profits from your forced “green” mandates.
LOL! Ain’t that the truth. I once was talking to a guy about property taxes and he told me that since he lived in an apartment the increase would not effect him.
7. november 2017
Norsk Hydro buys Swedish wind power
The aluminum giant Hydro is taking another stab at the renewables market. The company has now gone to Sweden to buy wind power.
https://e24.no/energi-og-klima/i/MgevdJ/norsk-hydro-kjoeper-svensk-vindkraft
—
12. november 2023
Trouble for Swedish wind power company after agreement with Hydro
On Monday, Hydro Energi will appear in Umeå District Court after the Swedish renewable energy company Markbygden Ett has applied for reconstruction.
https://e24.no/energi-og-klima/i/69GOm8/troebbel-for-svensk-vindkraftselskap-etter-avtale-med-hydro
That’s what you get for sigining a PPA without: 1) Analyzing long-term wind generation patterns (yours and others); and 2) believing Leftist government agency and wind energy huckster lies about energy markets. It doesn’t matter, though; ratepayers and taxpayers will pick up all the excess costs.
Working as designed. The politicians knew exactly what would happen, and the DEFCON level for the destruction of the global economy and a communist dictatorship has dropped yet another level.
Unelected EU bureaucrats: “We will ration your power and you will like it. Bread lines are in your future. Private jets are in ours.”
“In other words, the wind farm is obliged to pay the costs of its own intermittency.”
This is the only rational way to manage it. Have all suppliers bid to the same specification, points of delivery, scheduling of downtime for maintenance, regularity of supply. What technology they use should be up to them. If they want to use wind as part of their generation mix, fine.
The standard of supply at the moment is that routinely delivered by coal, CCGT or nuclear. Consistent supply, known amounts of scheduled downtime. Minimal interruptions. Have to require identical points of delivery. If a supplier can deliver to the points specified and to the service specification at a competitive price using wind, fine, accept it. No constraint payments. Deliver 24x 7 with no fluctuations other than those agreed in the spec. Treat all technologies exactly the same.
Same thing when going out to tender for peaker supply. Set the spec and leave the technology up to the market.
As this case is showing, if you do this, no-one will bid with wind or solar.
Global warming may or may not be a thing. What is becoming obvious is that either way, wind and solar are scams. The raw service they offer is unusable. They have only been able to make it financially in the past by passing on their intermittency costs and extra transmission costs to the buyer. And even then, the recent UK auction shows that even then the only way they are viable is if they don’t have to supply even the unusable raw supply to the prices they won the bid with.
You cannot run the electricity supply for modern economies on wind and solar, and this case is a clear example of that fact. Once you get all the costs into the financials, wind and solar are not viable technologies in this application.
Maybe wind is for a croft on an island in the north. Maybe solar is for villages in the middle of the Sahara. But for Europe or North America all the evidence coming in is that its hopeless.
What took everyone so long, and so many billions, to see this?
Excellent assessment.
What took so long? An abandonment of fundamental engineering practices.
I submit that wind and solar systems, through their production, operation, maintenance, transmission, and intermittency, are net CO2 positive when compared to CCGT, coal, and Nuclear systems. Prove me wrong. Show me a SINGLE aluminum, steel, concrete, or solar silicon production plant using solely wind and solar power to run the facility. I’ll wait…
Michel,
Many of us in the energy industry knew these things in the 1970s. We found new mines in remote places, so engineers studied electricity options. Diesel brought in by trucks was clearly the winner everywhere remote, so it was used. Intermittency of wind supply was known then. It was known to have low periods of up to weeks that were intolerable for running major plant like rock crushers and smelters, where a power failure is very costly.
Wind and solar did not get past first base. We read the reports from experts and asked more questions, did the economic analyses, the sensitivity studies and decided against intermittents.
What this shows is the damage caused when proper debate is suppressed or cancel cultured. All competent engineers would have recommended against wind and solar apart from some niche operations where lights out might be fun, like remote honeymoon resorts. They probably did recommend against w&S, but were overruled by ignorant dreamers with political bent.
It is time that decision making was returned to the competent. Geoff S
As you say, that has been very very obvious to engineers for decades! Maybe most engineers are too sensible and logical to become politicians!
Now that you mention it- there doesn’t seem to be many engineer politicians. There must be at least a few in Congress but I can’t think of any. To be a politician you have to make promises- knowing you can’t deliver on most. Perhaps engineers rebel at making undeliverable promises. They’re too reality oriented.
Boy is that true. Many years ago before I retired (thank God) I was a young lawyer doing jury trials in the USA. All the trial lawyers knew if you were selling emotions and not facts in your side of the case you would never allow an engineer on your jury panel. To them 2+2 is always 4 and no amount of tears is going to change that result.
In the oil crisis of the 1980s the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) dismissed wind as a form of electricity production citing its variability. Today National Grid just seems to go with the flow, though I guess many insiders know that wind can’t really cut it.
And there’s the issue.
When the wind don’t blow, electrons don’t flow.
Hey, is that an advertising slogan for reliable energy? lol
National Grid is bound to work with the generating industry that the government rules mandate. It would be so much easier to run a grid of reliable generation and just have some emergency back up such as Dinorwig in case of plant outages. Cheaper too.
Geoff, when these windmills started going up, I felt a bit of a fool. I am not terribly highly qualified, but all my engineering knowledge told me the thing could not possibbly be economically viable. Not at the scale our materials can handle, anyway. So for a while, I was rather abashed, having been proven wrong, not an easy thing for an engineer. I admired the scale of their toys, though…
So, please forgive me the sheer shadenfreude every time I read how right I (or rather the engineers who wrote my text books) was, all the time!
When I walked into college, the latest fashion was to teach us Communication Skills, because “engineers cannot communicate with real people”. They should teach finances, rather. (Not economics, we employ shysters for that)
I hope other authorities in other parts of the globe are sufficiently technically-aware to understand this. But I fear that, at least here in New Zealand, they will not be able to! Too many non-technical people in positions of authority where a modicum of technical knowledge is absolutely necessary!
“What took everyone so long, and so many billions, to see this?”
Looks to me as if everyone isn’t seeing this. My state of Wokeachusetts is still 100% certain it will save the Earth with its net zero plan by 2050.
What took so long?
Why should I stop something that milks subsidies by the billion?
Stop the subsidies, stop the corruption.
That is an excellent solution. Making wind farms, not the rest of the grid, pay the cost of intermittent power.
I suspect the data will show it is impossible for wind farms with a 1/3 capacity factor to make money. The will end up buying high and selling low unless backup up with their own fossil fuel generators.
Just drove across Texas. The windmills were mostly not turning and thankfully there were no new wind blade transport deliveries on the highways. That’s progress. The Permian Basin was busy as ever with many miles of service companies lining the corridor.
Imagine for a moment if everything in life had a 1/3 capacity factor like wind. 2 out of 3 times you got in the car to go somewhere it failed to start. 2 out of 3 times the lights didn’t work, the heat or cooling didn’t come on, the water didn’t come out of the tap, the toilet wouldn’t flush.
Why is it that everything else in life with a 1/3 capacity factor would long ago have been scrapped but somehow renewable energy is different.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/12/europes-largest-wind-farm-facing-bankruptcy/#comment-3815393
This is superb. Or your phone or your computer. The Big Green Lie. And Solar, only turns on between 10 am and 6 pm, sometimes. And Batteries, well there are not any Grid- Scale batteries, and not any time soon if ever. Lead-Acid battery invented in 1869, still used in most cars and trucks. Lithium-Ion batteries will never be grid-scale, not ever close.
Michael
One can sell real value or perceived value, and more often a mix of both. Food, clothing, housing, transportation, energy, medical care, education etc. have real value. Religions sell perceived value, but many people are wiling to pay, as long as makes them feel better. Entertainment and vacation industries are in the mixed category to start with. Then, even with things that have real value, a lot of perceived value is mixed in, allowing to charge premium – fashion industry, school rankings, eating at expensive restaurants… Green energy has little to nothing real value, but the customer mostly pays for “saving the world”, for feeling good. This is similar to religions that charge for saving ones sole. The difference is that secular states do not mandate paying dues to traditional religions.
The graphic of windmills and apparent waste byproducts of the systems looks to be an AI generated image. While use of such images can be useful, this website should label them as AI generated when they are used.
The physical waste from wind and PV systems is a very real concern topic, and synthetic images such as this one could skew the truthful assessment of the problems involved.
It could even open up WUWT to claims of falsification, which could be deemed as accurate if the images are taken at face value.
Yep, for all the people out there that think AI is the future – are you really going to trust a piece of software that can’t even recognise the concept of equidistant rotor blades..?
I just noticed that a few of the AI wind monsters have 4 blades. That doesn’t happen, does it? Maybe that’s a hint?
Sounds reasonable- but I think everyone here realizes the images are AI. I like them because they’re often great satire. And, no worry that the climate cultists will ever look at WUWT. They won’t. I can’t even get ordinary, middle of the road friends to look at this site. Just to be safe though I’d agree that a tiny note in the corner should indicate the images are AI generated.
I’ll repost from November 15:
I really like the mash-up image of Lenin and Hansen. Good satire speaks for itself.
However, I sometimes wonder whether captions aren’t in order to explicitly identify the many AI images you now use to open your posts even though their genesis may seem obvious. I would even enjoy seeing a post on how WUWT comes up with these computer generated grotesques and bizarre mutations of reality. Meanwhile…
WUWT prides itself on deconstructing inaccurate, misleading and self-serving theories and arguments. Your opponents aren’t just the fear mongering evangelists, but the alternate realities they create. As an important news source opposed to the fantasy world of the green proselytes, WUWT should hold itself to a higher editorial standard for the images it uses. Good, honest photojournalism has not gone out of style even if print newspapers have faded from the picture.
No, really!
Got a treatise for us on the violence in Jackson Pollock paintings? The distressing headaches from looking at Picasso’s excretions? The financial wizardry of the famous painter Hunter Biden?
Can you at least show us a sample of the certificate that qualifies people to complain about others’ art?
Does it wants a wee labely on that nice smiling prostituty da Vinci painted?
phllrrrrp!!!
Now, there’s a special kinda stupid!
Good news!
On my “news” feed this morning:
Wind power industry in moment of reckoning as stocks fall and earnings crumble (msn.com)
The True Believers in Human-caused Climate Change must be going crazy over this news.
What it means is their Net Zero hopes are dead, and to their minds, the Earth will slip over the 1.5C tipping point and that will be the end of life on Earth. They are contemplating their imminent personal death now. That’s not a good place to be if you truly believe you are close to death.
They need to read WUWT where people like me will inform them there is no evidence that CO2 is dangerous to humans, and then they can relax and enjoy life.
There’s no evidence CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth. If you think otherwise, you have been misled. Learn to distinguish between facts and evidence, and speculation, assumptions and assertions.
Speculation, assumptions and assertions are not evidence of anything. Human-caused climate change science is made up solely of speculation, assmuptions and assertions. No evidence involved.
Anyone who disputes this is welcome to present their evidence.
There won’t be any takers because there is no evidence to present. See how easy that is, True Believers? Your fears are not based on any evidence. It’s all in your head.
Here is one new 2023 study that says that depending on the surface temperature and solar irradiance datasets that one uses, one can show anything from mostly human-caused warming to mostly natural warming.
‘Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
The datasets are historical so there is not much that can be done about them.
Your first paragraph remind me of an old story.
Hollywood dinner. Present is, say, Oscar Wilde and some tittelating little starlet. At some point he turns to the vapid little thing, and asks if she would sleep with him for a million buck, to which she coquettishly agrees. He then proposes to pay her twenty bucks for some fellatio, to which the young star exclaims: “Sir! What kind of lady do you think I am?” to which the gentleman answers: “My dear, we already know what you are; now we’re quibbling over the price”.
As long as we agree humans are responsible for global warming, all’s good; we can argue about how much after we found you guilty.
Sorry, I’m out. You’se can play that game, not me.
…if we switch off all those cooling fans!
Whydya fink we call’em Wind Farms?
Filing for reconstruction? That’s the latest Wokespeak for taxpayer slushfunding of anoth er superlative Gummint hand picked winner presumably. Meanwhile the brains trust are softening up rooftop solar owners for some negative pricing-
Flattening the solar duck: Why households should also face negative export tariffs | RenewEconomy
Just in case you were thinking the watermelon heads can’t appreciate a bit of market marginal pricing occasionally here skeptical folks.
I wondered about that definition.
Bottom line is when the subsidies run out wind farms are losers.
Floating wind to the rescue!
I think this story is a bit sparse.
The stated problem is that this wind farm has is contractually committed to constant power supply even though it is clearly intermittent power supply.
If that is true, then the people who signed that contract are morons.The contract literally forced the cost of backup onto the wind farm.
But there’s more underneath this layer. A lot of the early wind and solar PV farms would get massive feed-in tariff subsidies. It seems there are none here because otherwise the “market” cost would be lower to this wind farm to “produce power” even if by buying power on the market LOL.
A third question mark is negative or low pricing. If the wind farm is fully exposed to market prices, then the market price for wind electricity generated from 10 pm to 4 am would be very low or negative. Did the wind farm have to eat these negative prices?
This is OT, but related:
Plug Power Shares Tank Most in a Decade on Hydrogen Crunch
and
Sure, blame “financial challenges”. 😉
Net Zero is falling down around their ears.
The real beauty is that Ruinables manufacturers are being forced out of business by high energy costs, which they helped to create!
The water vapor from burning hydrogen is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2,
LMAO Here is some more Net Zero Commentary “story tip” https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-alt-energy-bloodbath-in-10-charts
But no worries the parties will still continue in Davos, Aspen, etc.
Wonderful news!
For all the hype, political pressure, and BS behind it, Ruinable Energy will be destroyed by Physics and Economics.
But those that pushed this snake oil upon us will not be held accountable.
Unfortunately the energy consumers do not have a powerful lobby in Washington whereas the power merchants do.
Fair justice for “The nameplate farce”:
There should be financial penalties for wind and solar power plants inability to deliver at least 90% of their permitted nameplate ratings on an ANNUAL basis, like their backup competitors of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants that provide continuous uninterruptable electricity.
They would have to apply a myriad of derates.
couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch
A small dose of energy justice if wind farms are responsible for their own lack of social utility.
This video lists more reasons to believe Net Zero is Dead.
https://twitter.com/profstonge/status/1724058511301050728
It’s a good run-down.
The top pic is the future dystopia of green energy.
There is nothing “green” about filling landfills with old blades.
Bliar, didn’t call the UK, “Rip off Britain” for nothing. And he didn’t even attempt to rectify it.
Bliar was the rip off king
If renewables were financially viable they’d have been used commercially a long time ago. The fact they haven’t reveals everything you need to know. For people with any common sense, that is, which obviously precludes politicians and, it seems, a remarkable number of climate scientists.
It would be laughable except for the huge damage being done to economies and energy security.
Maybe the coming European recession and financial crisis (UK) will knock some sense into them. I’m not counting on it though.
Norway doesn’t really need any wind power, with a small population and loads of hydro. I suspect that Norsk Hydro was leaned on by politicians to join the stampede into “renewables”, and they made the logical choice of demanding a baseload purchase agreement.
And they went to Sweden to do it! So who gets stuck with the cleanup? A cynic might say that it looks like payback for centuries of (moderately benevolent) colonialism that didn’t end till 1905.
Sweden didn’t really need any wind power either, but was hamstrung by its vacillating on-again/off-again nuclear policy (which currently appears to be “sort of” on-again, at least on paper).
When the wind companies are not paying for their intermittent nature, the rest of us are.
More good news. Wind and solar should always be made to pay for their non production. Enforce this one rule and all of this renewable mess will be behind us.
While I agree with the spirit of your utterance, it is impractical; how do you measure non-production, and how many new rules, regulations and agreements do you think will be necessary to lay down all the nitty gritty of THAT policy?
No, cut all subsidies, and only pay them for what they actually deliver. Not capacity, delivery, measured with the standard 1950’s style Wattmeter like every house has.
Good luck finding customers willing to install a second, separate supply, that only works ten hours a week, but that’s another issue.
Just think how far we could have been, had these gazillions been spent on battery technologies, instead of executive salaries and private jets.