Wind Farming’s Spectacular Fall From Grace

As a passionate advocate for Solar PV and the environment, I’ve been interested in  renewable energy for many years now and derive my information from many sources.  Most of my career has been devoted to growing trees, landscaping and rehabilitating public open space.  With plant growth utterly dependent on CO2, I’m adamant that the trace gas is not a pollutant.  H/T John Droz Jr for much of the information below.

My investment in Solar PV is small but major investors have done it tough with renewables, particularly those backed by governments.  Here are seven Co’s that are now bankrupt.  All were backed heavily by US federal and local government.

Solyndra ($535 million)
A123 Systems ($435 million)
Beacon Power ($43 million)
EnerDel ($118.5 million)
Babcock & Brown ($178 million)
Solar Trust of America ($2.1 billion)
Abound Solar ($400 million)

Read The (Stubborn) Myth of Green Energy Investing at Wall St Daily

While the co’s listed above are all solar and energy storage enterprises, there are many govt subsidised wind farm projects around the world.  There are hidden costs with all renewable energy schemes and it would appear now that govt backing has been blown in the wind…

Wind generation has three unusual indirect costs that no one wants to discuss:

The cost of keeping available the primary fossil-fired plants that must balance wind’s large variations in output, even though adding wind to the system reduces the amount of generation for which they are paid.

The reduced fuel efficiency that wind imposes on those plants.

The cost of long-distance transmission and the losses that come with it….

In sum, there is no reason to think wind electricity will become competitive with conventional sources or replace any meaningful amount of fossil fuel. If we continue expanding it, wind generation will increase the cost of electricity, tie us to fossil fuels indefinitely and require us to build transmission lines that otherwise would be unnecessary. Those are no reasons for shifting any of wind’s cost from ratepayers to taxpayers. Congress should allow the wind-production tax credit to expire, as it always was intended to do.

 Read more at Washington Times

Why subsidize an industry that kills millions of birds and has no environmental benefit?

Begun 20 years ago to spur the construction of wind-energy facilities that could compete with conventional fossil-fuel power plants, the (US) tax credit gives wind an advantage over all other energy producers. But it has mostly benefited conventional nuclear and fossil-fuel-fired electricity producers. The biggest user of the tax credit is Florida-based NextEra Energy, the nation’s eighth-largest power producer. Through skillful manipulation of the credits, NextEra from 2005 to 2009 “paid just $88 million in taxes on earnings of nearly $7 billion,” Businessweek reports. That’s a tax rate of just 1.25 percent over that period, when the statutory rate is 35 percent…

John Droz Jr. notes: “There is no real environmental benefit to wind, because a) it’s an unpredictable commodity, b) output from any group of wind projects can and will go to zero on many occasions, and c) energy generated from industrial wind power cannot be economically stored.” Germany, which has gone stark raving mad in building wind turbines, has proven just how unreliable it is. On one day this February, wind power delivered a third of Germany’s electricity needs, but four days later, on a still day, it contributed precisely zero.

Then there is the carnage inflicted on Mother Nature. Paul Driessen reported in theWashington Times that “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wind turbines kill 440,000 bald and golden eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, cranes, egrets, geese, and other birds every year in the U.S., along with countless insect-eating bats.” The actual numbers are probably far higher. The turbine blades of the nation’s 39,000 windmills move at 100 to 200 miles per hour and can mow down anything that gets in their path.

Read more here

The (questionable) Performance of Wind Farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark

Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at Edinburgh teaches courses in the Economics of Natural Resources and Public Economics. He was a senior adviser on energy and environ- mental policy at the World Bank until 2001. He has advised governments on the design and implementation of environmental policies and was responsible for some of the World Bank’s most important environmental guidelines.

Published by The Renewable Energy Foundation, Hughes assessment of wind farms in the UK and Denmark is disturbing.

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….

Hughes Concludes:

Wind power is a highly capital-intensive technology for generating electricity. Its merits rely entirely upon a substitution of capital for fuel inputs. The same is true for hydro or tidal or wave power. In comparison with hydro power, wind is a low quality resource because of its variability and because it cannot be stored. So, the economic case for wind power must rest on obtaining the most out of the wind that is available.

While the decline in the achieved performance of onshore wind turbines in Denmark is much less than that for the UK or offshore, nonetheless the decline in expected output under standardised wind conditions over 10 years is 10% unweighted and 13% capacity weighted. These declines accelerate after age 10 so that the reductions in performance are 17% and 20% respectively after 15 years. For UK onshore wind farms the reduction in performance due to age is much worse at 27% unweighted and 69% capacity weighted by age 10.

Read the full report here

These Scots have had enough and are protesting

 Stop the reckless siting of wind turbines in Scotland’s scenic landscapes

The current policies of the Scottish Government are promoting the reckless development of industrial wind throughout the beautiful landscapes of Scotland.

Local planners across Scotland are being overwhelmed by permit applications. An average of 5 applications each day!

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show 5,528 applications have been made since May 2007,  overall a seven-fold increase over the previous administration.

One local authority, Aberdeenshire, has received more than 1,000 planning applications over this period, while a series of other rural councils have experienced a 14-fold increase.  Over 80% of large projects are being approved, even if local communities are opposed.

In short, Scotland’s natural beauty is under siege and may be irrevocably destroyed in the next 18 months. Soon there may not be a hilltop in Scotland without a view of turbines.

Help us deliver a message to the policy makers.

More information here 

MICHIGAN VOTERS WANT TO REPLACE WIND WITH GAS

Michigan voters defeat renewable energy madate by a nearly 2 to 1 margin

In Michigan and elsewhere, fossil fuel plants play the role of storage batteries to stabilize wind’s erratic output. German grid operator E.ON Netz explains:

“Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent. Their dependence on the prevailing wind conditions means that wind power has a limited load factor even when technically available . Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90 percent of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online [and burning fuel] in order to guarantee power supply at all times.”

Nuclear power plants are not permitted to cycle up and down to balance wind’s variability. So Michigan wind facilities must have fossil-fired plants spinning at nearly 100 percent of wind’s theoretical output online at all times to ensure grid stability: 900 megawatts for every 1,000 MW of wind.

This means there is no such thing as wind energy machines by themselves. Wind plants cannot replace coal, gas or nuclear plants. At best, they can reduce small amounts of fossil fuel generation. So the more correct phrase for wind energy is fossil/wind.

Consequently, despite much-ballyhooed claims that wind energy is gradually becoming cheaper than coal, such cost comparisons are intentional distractions. The federal Energy Information Agency concurs:

“The duty cycle for intermittent renewable resources, wind and solar, is not operator controlled, but dependent on the weather or solar cycle … and so will not necessarily correspond to operator dispatched duty cycles [consumer demand]. As a result, their levelized costs are not directly comparable to those for other technologies.”

Because wind cannot stand alone, the cost of wind energy production must be added to fossil generation costs. No matter how cheap wind becomes, it is a surcharge on top of fossil generation.

Read it all here

 Forbes 30 Under 30 The future of Energy is Nuclear

In looking over this year’s list and trying to see what themes emerged, a few things stood out.

First of all, old-school fossil fuel companies have virtually no representation on this list. That’s not because they don’t have talented young people working for them. But it’s harder for them to stand out, and many big, Borg-like enterprises are not enthusiastic about identifying them. (Prove me wrong Big Oil. Let’s identify the crop of young engineers who will lead the future.)

Second, the people who did make the list are primarily this: nerds who love science and are not only driven to solve problems but who also possess the entrepreneurial spirit to turn their inventions into companies or nonprofits.

Third, taken as a whole, if we were to apply all the ideas of these inventors, academics and entrepreneurs to the global energy grid, we could save oceans of fossil fuels and prevent mountains of carbon from entering the atmosphere….

Then there’s the nuclear engineers. Nuclear power is, of course, the world’s only large-scale source of reliable baseload power generation that emits zero greenhouse gases. The lingering drawback is that it creates nuclear waste, and, with older reactor designs there’s a small, but material, risk of a catastrophic meltdown.

Several of this year’s 30 are working to revolutionize nuclear power

Read more here

Wind farms no match for nuclear power plants
Wind farms occupy more land than nuclear power plant, are noisier and have a negative impact on the environment.

Renewable energy has recently become a global fad. You might ask what could possibly be better for the environment and the national economy of any country than alternative power generation, such as wind power plants. In reality, though, no power sources that depend on the forces of nature are totally dependable, which means that relying on them for national energy security is at the very least a mistake.

Just look at the situation in India’s state of Tamil Nadu, which at one time allocated huge tracts of land to accommodate wind farms. India has been perennially suffering from power shortages, with its appetite for electricity rising by the year as its economy grows. So, several wind generators dot the Western Ghat mountain range. The idea was for them to constantly generate very cheap electricity, except that, after the winds suddenly changed direction, most of the power plants simply grounded to a halt.

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant is now under construction right in the middle of this huge wind farm. “We are all waiting for this power plant. Everybody’s had enough of this electricity hunger,” Sundarajan from Kanyakumari, told RIA Novosti… Nuclear plants’ capacity utilisation rates reach 80 percent, while the best wind farms can boast is 30 percent.

Read it all here