I would like to subscribe to this blog - lies.com ” Ward on Why We Are Going Quietly Nuts. How to go about doing it?…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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

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.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It probably doesn’t take too many “alternative energy” facilities to make a nice per-capita dent in Denmark’s energy needs.

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

-Jebediah