Coyote Blog

I don't think you quite understand, Coyote. The fact that wind power is unreliable is simply part of Gaia's wonderous way. We are not supposed to build dirty fossil fuel power generation facilities as backup: we simply need to learn to live with highly unreliable power, that's all.

This is another example of plunging ahead without a complete engineering study. Because of the intermittent nature of wind power, it must be backed up with fossil fuel capacity. The only easy-to-start-up method is open cycle gas turbines. These have a much lower thermal efficiency than boiler-steam turbine plants. Thus, much of the savings of fuel from using wind power is lost when the standby generators are running. Finally, the TOTAL capital cost is out of sight.

Water storage of energy is a very bad idea. When you take into account the efficiency of pumping to storage, and the subsequent power generation in a water turbine, a substantial part of the power is lost (not to mention the cost of impoundment basins, pumps, and water turbines). A few simple calcs lays all these schemes to rest, unless you are the US government.Then you fund billions of dollars worth of research, protoypes, etc., only to find out that it was all nonsense in the first place.

Every alternative energy scheme I have looked at comes out the same. Simple calcs show them to be unworkable, uneconomical, usually both.

All this could have been determined before the first wind turbine was built. Gee! Isn't it more fun to fritter away money than to do the most elementary calculations?
We are doing the same thing with other forms of "alternative" energy. I guess my studying engineering many years ago was a waste of time. Just sight down your thumb and charge ahead without calculations!

> I guess my studying engineering many years ago was a waste of time. Just sight down your thumb and charge ahead without calculations!

Ted, Ted, Ted, you just aren't getting with The Program. Liberals were inspired by reruns of The Music Man on TV many, many decades past: They use the Think System, invented by Prof. Harold Hill.

They just THINK about how they want things to be, and Voila!! The universe provides!!

"Fie on your engineering (attach high voltage sneer onto that last word)!" sez they. "Clearly, you just need to figure out the right incantations! And you'll never, ever manage that with your negative attitude. You have to learn to WANT these things. And if you can't learn that, then perhaps some... re-education... is called for!"

Although my memory is incomplete, I seem to remember that the Czech Republic was forced to ban the import of German wind-driven power a couple of years ago to protect its electrical grid from damage.

Regards, Don

@Gringo
If you follow the links through to the original paper, you'll see that it explicitly addresses the argument of "The wind is always blowing somewhere". Their analysis found that that is not true for Britain, and that in fact 'very low wind events' happened with fair regularity throughout the year.

But let us accept that someplace like say the US West Coast is much bigger than Britain or Germany and that there will always be sufficient wind somewhere on the coast sufficient to generate at least a normal load on the turbines. If we were to rely on wind power without thermal backup, in order to have a stable grid we would need to maintain fully redundant capacity (and probably doubly redundant capacity) so we could be assured that no matter which region the wind is blowing in, there would be enough generating capacity on hand to supply not just that region but other regions as well.

This of course represents a huge duplication of effort and a corresponding outlay of resources. If the cost of wind power generation were low enough, it could still be a viable solution, but my impression is that the cost of wind is not nearly that low.

Gringo: Ever heard of "transmission losses"?

> As the US has much more area than Denmark or the UK or Germany, intermittent wind energy will not be as much an issue in the US.

perlhaqr and Gayle beat me to one point. Bryan sorta touches on another -- that in order to do what gringo suggests, the total number of turbines that must be placed in the field is enormous. These devices are hardly cheap. Producing 3,4,5 times as many of them just to produce "1x" the power is hardly an economically viable solution.

The last one that everyone seems to have missed is noise pollution. These things ain't quiet, folks...

You start putting them all across the landscape and you're not going to be amused with THAT, either.

What gringo and virtually every other fan of Alternative energy doesn't get is the same thing as with money -- in order to get anything done, you basically have to concentrate it. Energy doesn't do work unless you can make it flow. That requires a high concentration of energy. Since wind and solar energy are so dreadfully dispersed, they really ARE NOT capable of being readily concentrated to make the energy do work.

Likewise with money -- if you want to get a substantial project off the ground -- build a skyscraper, a large company, or a strip mall, you need a certain minimum concentration of capital -- that is, money -- and then that money has to flow somewhere. One of the real reasons for recessions and depressions is that people lose faith in their ability to get more money, and so they hoard it somewhat, keeping it in reserve for a critical need. And so the economy, driven by capital flows, grinds to a halt. It's a positive feedback loop, unfortunately, as the decreased flow makes the economy worse which scares people more which means they hoard which means the money doesn't flow which makes the economy...**

**NOTE: This is NOT a defense of Keynesianism. Government "flows" of money don't
1) occur in truth -- usually it's just "created" money, which has a deleterious effect on the economy all its own.
2) have proper direction -- often they're directed towards makework projects rather than valued, worthwhile projects that natural market forces have developed.
3) demonstrate efficiency of capital use. They encourage rent seeking rather than rational economic behavior.
Q.E.D., the flows in question have to derive from natural, proper sources of capital formation. Allowing people to have more of their own money, encouraging businesses to expand or otherwise act in a "safer", more predictable economic environment is the best goals. Encouraging stability is the best way to allay peoples' fears about the short-term future of an economy.

Gayle:
Or the insane idea that rural citizens of the US really do not want millions of acres of wind turbines cluttering up the landscape and killing birds to provide this mythical continuity?

That’s right, Ted Kennedy didn’t want the Cape Wind turbines cluttering up the view from his Hyannisport compound. You agree with Ted, don’t you?

Regarding bird kill, I suggest you read Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects. [National Academies Press]
Having said the above, we provide here estimates summarized by Erickson et al. (2005) and estimates reported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS 2002a). Those sources emphasize the uncertainty in the estimates, but the numbers are so large that they are not obscured even by the uncertainty. Collisions with buildings kill 97 to 976 million birds annually; collisions with high-tension lines kill at least 130 million birds, perhaps more than 1 billion; collisions with communications towers kill between 4 and 5 million based on “conservative estimates,” but could be as high as 50 million; cars may kill 80 million birds per year; and collisions with wind turbines killed an estimated 20,000 to 37,000 birds per year in 2003, with all but 9,200 of those deaths occurring in California. Toxic chemicals, including pesticides, kill more than 72 million birds each year, while domestic cats are estimated to kill hundreds of millions of songbirds and other species each year. Erickson et al. (2005) estimate that total cumulative bird mortality in the United States “may easily approach 1 billion birds per year.”
Clearly, bird deaths caused by wind turbines are a minute fraction of the total anthropogenic bird deaths—less than 0.003% in 2003 based on the estimates of Erickson et al. (2005).

I do think that using wind power to do things like pump water up to the top of municipal towers or other activities that don't require constant effort (perhaps hydrolyzing water to make hydrogen?) would be worth additional study - it's probably a useful solution to a corner case. However, as a first-line solution, wind power is terrible for all of the reasons you describe.

Gringo to IGotBupkis
Are you going to tell me that solar energy and wind energy in the Great Plains are of similar magnitudes of energy dispersion?
My point, which admittedly could have been expressed better, is that wind energy and solar electric energy have vastly different economic profiles. I have been paying for wind energy in my household for 7 years at prices that are comparable to what has been charged for fossil sources. Solar electric energy would have cost much more.

From nuclearfissionary.com, which is hardly an advocate of wind energy.

Nuclear and coal are tied at $0.04 per kWh. This comes as a bit of a surprise because coal is typically regarded as the cheapest form of energy production. Another surprise is that wind power ($0.08 per kWh) came in slightly cheaper than natural gas ($0.10 per kWh). Solar power was by far the most expensive at $0.22 per kWh—and that only represents construction costs because I could not find reliable data on production costs.

The wind energy cost profile in the above article is roughly equal to what I have been paying for wind energy for the last 7 years.

The WSJ articleWind Power Hits a Trough also shows that wind energy is much more cost effective than solar electric energy. It also shows that wind energy can be competitive with more conventional energy sources. Contrary to the above source, it shows wind energy as competitive with coal-fueled electric energy.

The Energy Information Administration projects that, in 2016, the cost of producing electricity from a new wind farm will be about equal to that from a new gas-fired plant in the windiest parts of America's midsection, such as the Dakotas and Colorado. It forecasts that producing wind power still will cost about twice as much as producing gas-fired power in less-windy places such as the Mid-Atlantic coast and the Southeast.

Build them on the Great Plains, not where the wind doesn’t blow.

Without renewable-energy mandates, Horizon's Mr. Alonso says, most wind farms would be built only where they are economically competitive: in the nation's midsection. That, he says, would mean that wind "wouldn't become a sustainable source of growth for the country."

I would not agree here with Mr. Alonso. Build wind turbines on the Great Plains, where they are competitive, not where the wind doesn’t blow.

Gringo, you don’t know what you’re talking about, PERIOD.
Then go ahead and refute the above sources. If you can do that THEN you can correctly claim that I don’t know what I am talking about.

That you do not appear to distinguish in cost effectiveness between wind energy and solar electric energy just might indicate that YOU do not know what you are talking about.

I found it rather comical that you spent about half your time in your previous comment making the case against solar electric energy when nowhere did I indicate that I was at present in favor of vastly increased use of solar electric energy. The only mention I made of solar electric energy was to make an implied comparison between it and wind energy. Nothing you wrote about solar electric energy changed my mind about it. I already agreed with you about solar electric energy. It is currently nowhere near being a cost-effective electricity source. See the above links.

I am also in favor of increased use of nuclear energy. I am not in favor of green mandates to kill off coal-fueled electric energy. Similarly, we need to drill offshore and in Alaska. The sleazy operations of BP should not be used as justification to damn an entire industry, especially since at Macondo BP violated accepted industry procedures in many ways.