There’s a wonderful article in the current issue of Insight, the energy journal published by Platts, called “The Unbearable Lightness of Wind.”
The author, Ross McCracken, tackles the question that nobody has posed yet – what are the economic consequences going to be of putting up all these wind turbines with government subsidies, mandates and “feed-in tariffs” that tell the utilities, “Buy it whatever it costs”?
“The conundrum,” McCracken writes, “lies in the fact that wind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.”
What’s likely to happen, McCracken argues, is that windmills – which generate electricity only 30 percent of the time – will replace some peaking power and some base-load power:
As wind provides neither baseload nor peaking plant it has no impact on reserve capacity. . . [I]t increases redundancy in peaking plants and reduces the profits of baseload generation; potentially good for consumers but bad for investment in non-intermittent sources of power, and presenting the risk of a decline in reserve capacity. . . . [P]eaking plants would be used much less and baseload plant would see sustained period of potential below cost prices – a particular nightmare for the nuclear industry.
So without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.
William Tucker has written about environmental and energy issues for twenty-five years. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Review, New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His most recent book Terrestrial Energy (Bartleby) is about nuclear power. He is a regular guest contributor to The Infrastructurist.
April 24th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
This argument seems to make sense, but the conclusion that adding wind power won’t meaningfully reduce carbon emissions is suspect for two reasons. First, countries that have added significant amounts of wind power (e.g., Denmark) have seen proportional decreases in CO2 emissions per capita. Second, this argument seems to neglect the fact that additional wind power must go hand in hand with new transmission capacity and smart grid technology. This will allow wind power to be ‘averaged-out’ over a larger area, making it a more significant contribution to base-line and peak needs than if it is constrained to one region.
April 24th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Poor William… on the one hand you decry the government subsidies and feed in tariffs that benefit wind generation but try to sell us on nuclear as a viable non-carbon alternative? So nuclear isn’t subsidized? Sure nukes can provide base load power but at what cost to the public and future generations? As Andy states, the answer is to use wind energy in a smarter and more flexible fashion, not stick with your old tired dogma about the nuclear industry. We need wide dispersement of turbines, smart grid technology and more wires while we await the storage technologies of the future.
April 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Quite frankly, if you don’t see nuclear as the obvious choice if CO2 emissions are a major concern, then you aren’t very smart. Wind energy, while a nice niche market, is not a long term effective use of land, resources or money.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
What Taylor said.
-Jebediah
April 25th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
[...] WHAT’S WRONG with wind power. [...]
April 25th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Andy,
The assumption that wind power will be “averaged out” is easy to test. The highest power consumption occurs when it is at the hot and cold extremes. The conditions that produce these extremes include very little wind over large areas. I suggest the first heat wave of the summer you check out the wind maps.
As far as Denmark goes correlation does not equal causation. Their reduction in CO2 is primarily a result of switching from coal and oil to natural gas.
Ron,
Nuclear is indeed subsidized at $1.59 per mega-watt-hour. Wind is subsidized at $23.37 per mega-watt-hour.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/index.html
April 25th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Denmark has a population of about 5.5 million. New York City alone has a population of over 8 million.
It probably doesn’t take too many “alternative energy” facilities to make a nice per-capita dent in Denmark’s energy needs.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Re: Denmark. I have heard that poster-boy Denmark has ceased building wind power many years ago because if the extreme unreliability. When the wind is blowing, there was not enough capacity to deliver it. And as was more often, when the wind wasn’t blowing, Denmark had to import from other countries.
Re: Nuclear power and future generations. Usually the complaint about nuclear power is about waste storage. But what do anti-nuclear activists say about what Sweden, France, and Japan are doing with their waste? What would the outlook on nuclear waste in America for future generations be if the U.S nuclear power industry could do with its nuclear waste what Sweden, France, and Japan do with theirs?
April 25th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
We’re going to have serious problems keeping the lights on aren’t we?
Not only are we going to rely on feel-good intermittent windpower for a big chunk of electricity but that windpower is going to financially undermine our reliable sources of power.
Honestly, why don’t we just pack up our remaining factories and ship them to China right now and save everyone some time? We’re going to end up with the worst of all worlds, no power, no economy and massive CO2 production in the parts of the world that do have power and an economy.
Oh, well, I guess 30 years down the road the Chinese will have perfected mass produced nuclear plants. Maybe they’ll sell us some.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Hasn’t this been known for some time?
Any sober analysis that I’ve seen regarding wind power acknowledges the same basic set of facts presented here - and comes to similar conclusions.
Having followed this area for almost two decades, I’ve come to suspect that there is a significant, and influential, cohort among alt. energy activists that doesn’t actually want to see a viable clean energy infrastructure come to be. They seem more interested in promoting asceticism, and use alt. energy as a foil which allows them to present their ideas as forward-looking rather than regressive.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Yep.
The real goal of the “alternative” energy (actually anti-energy) folks is to make energy expensive and scarce, in order to force the serfs (that would be most of you) to adopt the lifestyle they prefer you to have.
That would be less liberty, fewer choices, generally poorer. But hey, you ARE serfs, so if you have to suffer to make them happy, its not a problem … to them.
Feinstein’s recent ojbection to buidling solar power in the desert make this point pretty clearly.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:27 am
I keep going back to the many, many windmills in the hills between Livermore and the Central Valley in NoCal. From 1992 to 2000 when I lived out there, when I drove past them, I would imagine a Hitchcock film set amongst the derelict windmills, Cary Grant running around windmills too expensive to maintain, Cristo conceptual art and fearfull drama rolled into one.
Carter had, in the name of whatever, spent huge tax incentives for rich people to build windmills for subsidies. When the tax advantages ran out the cost of maintaining them surpassed the energy output so they sat, locked in place.
And these new windmills, what does it cost to build them, maintain them, support the infrastructure around them, and, in too few years, tear them down as unproductive eyesores. They don’t really bother me that much, sitting there on the greening hills above the valley. I kind of like Cristo. Sad though that the painful lesson of the state making economic decisions needs to be, painfully, relearned, this time in vast amounts of degraded currency.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:47 am
You can’t make a Lefty understand the difference between the reliability of an atom generating heat when it is split, and the reliability of wind blowing strongest on the days you most need power. Nor can you make a Lefty understand that there isn’t enough wind blowing reglarly in the entire North American continent to power just the state of Vermont.
Lefties FEEL as though the wind has enough force to generate millions of megawatts simply because the wind that blows through their vacant heads makes it seem to them as if it is never ending. To them, there is such a thing as getting more power out of a system than is put into a system. The limits outlined by the law of thermodynamics is an evil BigOil plot…one that the Messiah can surely overcome with his enormous brain and brilliant lawyerly skills.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Wind farming should be more accurately labeled subsidy farming.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:45 am
My question about wind power has always been this: How long does it take one windmill to generate enough energy to build another windmill?
It isn’t, I accept, an easy question as wind power is intermittent and unreliable, but some one may have done the research. In which case a link to it would be helpful. Thanks
April 26th, 2009 at 5:25 am
algore burns more jet fuel in one trip than I will ever use in my life
April 26th, 2009 at 9:09 am
“countries that have added significant amounts of wind power (e.g., Denmark) have seen proportional decreases in CO2 emissions per capita. Second, this argument seems to neglect the fact that additional wind power must go hand in hand with new transmission capacity and smart grid technology.”
Denmark could use wind because it is small and because it could buy electricity from countries with REAL power generating stations (not fairy-tale windmills). It doesn’t matter how smart a grid you have if it gets 0MW and 0MVAR when the wind doesn’t blow.
“Sure nukes can provide base load power but at what cost to the public and future generations? ”
How many people have been sickened by LLW in a dump or HLW in storage? Oh - that’s right - NONE.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:34 am
The real problem with wind is that the lifetime thermodynamic footprint of a wind generator is negative. It will never deliver as much power in it’s lifetime as it takes to build, operate and maintain it.
You can distort the economics with subsidies. But you can’t fool the laws of thermodynamics.
BTW: Last I heard the 30% utilization factor was the planning figure. Spain was actually getting 4%. And costing 2.2 jobs for every green job.
April 26th, 2009 at 10:15 am
JEL is absolutely right, otherwise we would be living in a world powered by perpetual motion machines. In addition, Power Magazine reports that wind turbine builders haven’t solved the problem of reliable gearboxes for the turbine. They report that these gearboxes frequently require replacement on a “non scheduled basis” and that the replacement cost is high, due not only to the cost of the equipment, but the means to access a unit 200 to 300 feet above the ground. It is even more expensive for those units in deep water, such as in Europe. And please, let’s stop referring to wind as a renewable energy source, reoccurring yes, renewable, no.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Diggs (and a few others) -
I don’t think this has anything to do with “left” or “right.” We need an honest debate about energy. As the editor of this site, I’m hoping we can be a vital, non-dogmatic forum for talking about these questions. I have nothing against wind power. I think it’s wonderful, in theory. But I’m not convinced that it can work on the scale that many proponents are saying it can. Ron’s comment is a perfect example:
“We need wide dispersement of turbines, smart grid technology and more wires while we await the storage technologies of the future.”
Oh, right. Make a multi-trillion dollar investment “while we await the storage technologies of the future.” I mean, just think about that statement for a second.
What really makes no sense to me is why more progressives don’t support nuclear power.
-Jebediah
April 26th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
[...] Al Gore, Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Energy, Environment, global warming, junk science The dirty little secret of wind power is [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
When so much is said about nuclear waste being radioactive for thousands of years, what is meant is that it takes that time for it to decay down to the same level as the background radiation. Nuclear waste loses 90% of its radioactivity in 10 years. Granted, it has to be stored properly, but it is not as bad as its detractors would have you believe. And, at that, it is not as bad as coal waste, which has both chemical poisons with no half-life but is also a low-level radioactive waste (some years ago in the U.S. some coal waste was used in making cinderblocks and they had to go find all of them, tearing down buildings in the process, to bury the blocks), and there is MUCH more waste from a coal-burning power plant than from an equivalent nuclear plant.
Wind power is useful in certain niche markets, usually small-scale; the problem lies in trying to make it do what it is simply not capable of. And I have not seen anyone describe the potential environmental effects of taking all that energy from the wind (assuming that windmills are built in the profusion that their fans want). It could not help but affect the weather and the climate, mostly in areas where people are, as that is where the windmills would be built.
April 26th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
What really makes no sense to me is why more progressives don’t support nuclear power.
1. They think that nuclear reactors are equivalent nuclear weapons - and because nuclear weapons are ‘bad’ so is Nuclear Power. This is the traditional basis of opposition to NP from the Left.
2. They think that effective nuclear wastes management is impossible and that no innovation, technical or otherwise, will change that fact.
3. They think that Nuclear Power is ‘unnatural’, so it must be bad for the environment.
4. They’d prefer a regulatory approach to the problems that NP addresses. That is, NP is a solution but what they’d prefer is an ongoing regulatory regime to address an intractable problem.
5. Someone told them that Progressives oppose NP and so that’s their opinion as well.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
“”First, countries that have added significant amounts of wind power (e.g., Denmark) have seen proportional decreases in CO2 emissions per capita. “”
not only has carbon emissions gone up in denmark ,but what they produce is shipped to sweden and norway and is used there to refill their reservoirs and re exported to denmark and germany
the euros have been awarding carbon credits for reducing co2 emissions and denmark was awarded NADA…(nothing)
April 26th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
[...] SOMETHING WRONG WITH WIND POWER: Wind power’s dirty little secret: So without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
[...] than running away like such a scaredy cat. The truth is, he is helping run a scam, or really, multiple scams, and he knows [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
eh, wind power needs a worthwhile way of storing the power it generates. If that happens it will be much more attractive, as you can then save the power harvested on windy days for use later. That’s not easy though, as nobody has yet managed such a energy storage system.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:29 am
The problem isn’t wind power, it is BIG WIND.
Small wind can replace most central production. Our windmill requires only one knot to provide negative net metering for the average householder and is cheap to make. No good for GE, great for the masses. greenwindmill.com
April 27th, 2009 at 8:51 am
> That’s not easy though, as nobody has yet managed such a energy storage system.
I believe the phrase you seek is “magical pie-in-the-sky”.
Don’t worry, though — Obama will wave his fairy wand, sprinkle the problem with pixie dust, and allllllll willllll beeeeee welllllllll in the land of Oz.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:02 am
> there is MUCH more waste from a coal-burning power plant than from an equivalent nuclear plant.
LOL, John, that is the understatement of the year.
The total, processed un-reusable waste from a typical nuke plant for a year (much larger, mind you, than a typical coal plant) would fit under your kitchen table.
A reliable technology for storing such has long been recognized, and has finally been set up at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
During the campaign, Obama made a comment while passing through Vegas:
“He[McCain] wants to build 45 new nuclear reactors when they don’t have a plan to store the waste anywhere besides right here,” he[Obama] said.
The total actual waste produced by those 45 new reactors wouldn’t take up any real space.
The amount of waste produced by an operating nuke after processing is like 1-2 cubic YARDS each year — this would be how so many nuke plants have managed to operate for THIRTY YEARS AND MORE without such a facility — they actually store it on-site !!!
So 45×2=90 cubic yards. Well under a railcar a year for ALL those new plants…
Oh, be still mah beatin’ hart… Now go look up how many rail cars of coal the average coal-fired plant uses in a single *day*, and you’ll start to get an idea about how much highly toxic sludge gets captured by the scrubbers.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am
[...] Details here. [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Vanadium Batteries are a potential solution for wind power:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/29-the-element-that-could-change-the-world/?searchterm=battery
And Obama didn’t even need to wave a magic wand…
April 29th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Good comments all around. I urge you all to read my book, Terrestrial Energy. Preview it at http://www.terrestrialenergy.org. It answers the question of whether nuclear power is “natural” and many other questions as well. (I visited France and saw their facility for storing 30 years of waste. It would make a nice basketball court.
May 14th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Is Wind Power the fix for global warning?
As an environmental engineer and consultant to the power industry I support the use of wind power as long as it can be technically achieved and is economically sound. But if it does not meet this criteria, then pushing it as the primary replacement for conventional energy sources is irresponsible. It lulls people into believing that we have an answer that we do not have and in doing so will delay other critical decisions that have to be made NOW to prevent further damage to our environment and to our economy.
Wind turbines have greatly improved in the last 20 years and are now bigger, cheaper and much more reliable than they were in their infancy. Huge 7MW turbines are now possible and the technology is available to keep them operating in high wind conditions. Inverters have been developed to condition the power so it can be fed into the grid without the electric disruption associated with synchronous generators used on early wind turbines.
However the energy output of wind turbines is still wildly variable and unpredictable. The average production output from wind turbines installed in the best selected sites is 22% to 25% averaged over a year. This average figure is deceptive because it implies some kind of repeatability while there may be days and even weeks where to output is near zero and days or weeks where it is at 100%. Unfortunately, consumers cannot tailor their use of electricity to match this availability, and since there is currently no technology available to store large amounts of energy, the power must be used as it is made and made when it is needed. So other production facilities must be ready to make up this power when the wind farms cannot deliver.
To illustrate this I use a simplified example of a single isolated city needing 100MW of power to supply homes, businesses and industry. The hypothetical city installs 100MW of wind turbines. Installing more than a 100MW is not a good use of money as the extra power over 100MW will be wasted when the turbines are operating at full load (Remember the energy can’t be stored). But when there is no wind, the city still needs 100MW of power… so it must install a back-up system for the full 100MW. Since the 100MW wind farm will produce 22 to 25MW on average the back-up source will have to make 75 to 78MW on average.
The output from the wind farm can vary significantly in a short timespan so the back-up source must be something that can quickly change load in opposite direction, but especially something that can be taken all the way from 0% to 100% and back again. This constraint severely limits what the back-up source can be. Of the current power sources only natural gas turbines and hydroelectric facilities have the ability to change loads at the speeds and ranges required by the wind farms. Since hydroelectric plants are already zero emission sources the idea of throttling their output in order to use wind power is absurd. This leaves gas turbines as the most usable back-up for wind power. Gas turbines are already in the top tier in terms of cost of electricity so a mixed supply of 100MW wind turbines and 100MW gas turbines will make expensive electricity for our hypothetical city and only reduce the greenhouse gasses by 22 to 25% over running the gas turbines alone without building the wind farm.
If our city now decides to build more wind turbines to raise the percentage of “green” energy and installs 200MW of wind turbines instead of 100MW… Now anytime the output of the wind farm exceeds 100MW (50%) it is lost because the energy can’t be stored so instead of delivering 22 to 25% of 200MW doubling the percentage of power use from the wind farm, the wind farm can now only deliver 16-18% of its capacity because the remainder is lost during high wind conditions. But we now have reached a 32 to 36% energy ratio from wind albeit at a high cost since our city has 300MW (200MW wind + 100MW gas) of production capacity to meet a 100 MW demand. What makes things worse is that with such a big ratio (200%) of uncontrollable (wind) to controllable power (gas-turbines) the city’s electric distribution grid becomes unstable with big fluctuations in voltage and frequency which makes lights flicker, motors change speeds and electronics blip out.
Of course by choosing the wind power route the city has also locked itself into burning gas in expensive gas turbines for the balance of its power needs and could no longer elect to use nuclear power or a coal-fired boiler, even considering that these choices are more energy efficient and produce less greenhouse gasses than the gas-turbines.
Extrapolating this example to the entire United States shows why there is a limit to the percentage of electric power that can be derived from wind. To push windpower, even to a modest 5-10% level, will also lock us into a significant number of inefficient/costly/greenhouse-gas-producing gas turbine generation stations to counterbalance the erratic output of the windfarms. To push windfarms above the 10% will necessitate a means of storing the energy to buffer their erratic output and this problem is not even close to being solved.
The wind power industry dismisses the above argument because they focus on the addition of windfarms in the current situation with a variety of sources already available to back them up. Since this is like adding a bucket of water to the ocean they are correct but they do not want to discuss where this leads if a significant percentage of the US generating capacity was to be derived from wind farms and this is what needs to be discuss if our plan for the future uses wind as a main source of power.
While this model is over-simplified it is an accurate representation of the issues that would face a country that decided to push its wind power generation toward the 20% level. Some environmental groups are pushing for targets in the range of 30% to 50% wind power by 2050 which is physically impossible to achieve. Plans based on wishful thinking not only sink themselves but they also divert effort from the search for a real solution.
From an installed-cost point of view wind power is extremely expensive. Wind farm project costs typically run $1,700 to $2,000 per installed kW or 1 to 1.2 billion $ for a 600MW unit (100 to 300 windmills depending on their size). A 600 MW coal-fired powerplant costs around 900 million $ installed. But taking into account that the latter on average can produce 95-98% of its design capacity while the former can only deliver 22-25% the capital cost of wind power per KWh is 5 to 6 times higher than the capital costs of a high-efficiency, clean-coal power plant. This explains why no wind power projects would be built without government subsidies or legislation penalizing the more cost-competitive alternatives.
May 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 am
Domestic Solar Power…
I would like to subscribe to this blog - lies.com ” Ward on Why We Are Going Quietly Nuts. How to go about doing it?…
December 14th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
All wind mills do is line companies like GE’s Pocket. They ruin the land scape, and cause massive amounts of land destruction. They also cost a lot of carbon themselves . Think about all the oil it takes to lube one of those massive eye sores. That oil has to be refined doesn’t it. Then lets talk about all the cement that has to be produced, which is mined, which takes heavy equipment, which wait….. wait…… produce carbon emissions. We haven’t even built the wind mill yet, so now that we have created massive amount of chemicals. Mind metals an cement.Tthen trucked them to there location to be erected using yet more carbon producing equipment. Then after they are all in place there is millions of tons more metal that needs to be mined ( oh wait more carbon) so that we can fabricate more transmission lines (which are longer than average a because city slickers don’t want these things in there back yards, so we put them on top of the mountains killing and ruining wildlife as we know it ). Then there is the maintenance the people who preform it have to drive long distances to maintenance them using more gas producing more carbon while the change the oil that has to be disposed of and more refined not to mention. The darn thing just broke down and cost millions to be repaired (never gonna pay for its self) but since those of you who believe in this wind crap have your heads so far up Al Gores A** that You cant figure out that the trees that they cut to make the roads to service these ( affronts to human intelligence ) would have actually changed more Co2 to oxygen than the wind mill itself will save, have been genetically deprived of intelligence it does no good to explain any of this because your just gonna say nu uh that’s not true the good faeries just made them with there wands. It causes me to reconsider my position on Abortion because this world would have been better without the negative evolution .