Why Wind Power Does Not Greatly Reduce Fossil Fuel Use
The problem with wind power is that electric utilities have to be prepared at any time for their power production to just stop on short notice. So they must keep fossil fuel plants on hot standby, meaning they are basically burning fuel but not producing any power. Storage technologies and the use of relatively fast-start plants like gas turbines mitigates this problem a bit but does not come close to eliminating it. This is why wind power simply as a source contributing to the grid makes very little sense. Here is Kent Hawkins of Master Resource going into a lot more depth:
How do electricity systems accommodate the nature of wind and solar? They do this by having redundant capacity almost equalling the renewable capacities as shown in Figures 5 and 6 for two jurisdictions that have heavily invested in wind and solar – Germany and Ontario, Canada.
Figure 5 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Germany in 2015.
Source: See note 4, sub point a.
Figure 6 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Ontario, Canada, in 2018
Source: Ontario Power Authority[5]
In both figures, the left-hand columns are peak demand requirements and include all the dispatchable capacity that is required to reliably meet demand and provide operating reserve. In the right-hand columns, if you look very carefully, you can see the capacity credit for wind by the slight reduction in “Peak Demand + Op Reserve.” In summary, when wind and solar are added, the other generation plants are not displaced, and, relative to requirements, wind and solar are virtually all duplicate capacity.
Wind might make more sense in niche applications where it is coupled into some kind of production process that can run intermittently and have its product stored. I think T Boone Pickens suggested having wind produce hydrogen from water, for example, and then store the hydrogen as fuel. This makes more sense because the total power output of a wind plant over a year can be predicted with far more certainty than the power output at any given minute of a day. This is one reason why the #1 historic use of windpower outside of transportation has been to pump water -- because the point is to fill the tank once a week or drain the field over a month's time and not to make absolutely sure the field is draining at 10:52 am. The intermittent power is stored in the form of water that has been moved from one place to another.
Subsidizing a thermal coal plant is expensive too; much more expensive, in fact. Thermal coal would have collapsed in the USA a quarter century ago if not for the largest subsidy and entitlements program in the world.
So if you can't afford to arbitrage off your excess production in coal by paying wind farms to feather their much less expensive per kWh blades, what business do you have being in business?
And what you see all the time as spin, accountants see as dollars. Taxpayer dollars. Consumer dollars. Real money you want to pretend isn't being flushed down the coal drain.
Some wind is subsidized in the USA. More in the past, less in the future, but always far less than fossil. It is a great power source due to its availability being generally highest when demand is generally highest, its cost being much less per kWh than cost of consumables per kWh, and its ability to make the marginal cost of storage in water management infrastructure so much more worthwhile, lowering the carrying cost of flood control and irrigation, drought relief and erosion mitigation.
Sure, I get it. You love you your fossil, and you feel entitled to handouts from the Nanny State to keep it, because it lines your wallet and you don't want to see who you're hurting and who you're leeching off of, because that makes you feel bad.
Well, you maybe ought to feel bad about being a parasite.
You can tell when someone has lost an argument when they start throwing insults.
For your information, I'm an electrical engineer have studied the impact of intermittent energy on the electric power system in depth, but I am not in any way affiliated with the industry. You obviously haven't, since you are clueless about the real costs of intermittent energy to a system.
I would be happy to see lots of solar power, if it were economical. It is not, due to intermittency. The same is true of wind farms, except I want them to go away because they are not only uneconomical, they are horrible eyesores that every environmentalist would hate and demonstrate against if they weren't stuck in the CO2 is causing the world to end eschatology.
Enjoy your unicorn world, but it will come crashing down unless economical storage systems are developed - which is possible but far from certain.
Goodbye.
"Seems like that's a lot of potential energy that could be exploited." It would be if you could capture it all at once, but you can't. The force is spread out over a 12 hour span, so you could only capture a tiny fragment of that force. And while a float pulling on a gear could in theory generate electricity, to capture the force needed for the local tide to lift the Queen Mary, you would need a float the size of the Queen Mary.
Ooh. I'm so impressed. A real honest-to-goodness electrical engineer!
Why, those must be as rare as unicorns.
And imagine finding two in the same discussion at the same time, with opposite views!
We were having an argument?
No.
You were telling half truths and untruths. I was pointing them out, and setting out what would have to be the only explanation for your conduct.
I well remember 35 years ago being told flat out by two senior electrical engineers that no grid could ever stabilize with more than a fraction of a percent intermittency, ever. A fact of Physics they said.
What fraction of your grid is intermittent? Is it 5%? 15%? 25%?
There are grids that successfully run on as much as 100% 'intermittent' for hours or days at time.
Nor has Germany FREAKING built new coal because of wind. That is a flat out falsehood. Just like the one about arbitrage you started with.
Germany built new coal because the old coal was so awful, and the government had a deal to keep coal hobbling along while retraining the population rather than put coal workers out of jobs cold turkey. Germany's gone from over 80% minimum load following on fossil to 40%, and is capable of 25% right now except for the sake of protecting obsolete jobs, soon to be 20%. German thermal coal capacity has dropped, and the plan is for German thermal coal to go away. You know about German planning, right?
And once Germany has 20% storage -- easily achieved with pumped hydro or pumped thermal or on an EV or solar distributed grid battery system -- it will have zero need for consumable electricity costing as much as four fifths less than today, with three times the jobs in the electricity industry.
Because there's two kinds of engineers in any field of engineering: those who can cause the problems, and those who can fix the problems.
So again, I say you're a fossil deadbeat denying science and making up excuses for failing to open your wallet and pay what you owe for the fossil waste dumping you do.
I think people imagine that producing electricity is like producing toasters. You just make them and it is all ok. They have no idea about how much demand fluctuates during the day, how you can't just turn coal or nuclear on or off with a flip of a switch, that getting wind energy to the grid from remote locations can be expensive, and that wind can overload the circuits. While this is understandable for the general population, there is no excuse for activists and journalists who simply don't bother to learn these simple facts.
@disqus_Bq7vuC9sxH:disqus
Well, if lifting the Queen Mary up and down doesn't actually require/produce that much energy, that may be that. Not very intuitive but there it is....
That maybe the short answer to my original query. As per 'markm' above it doesn't seem that lifting a metric shit-ton of weight up and down actually requires or produces that much energy.
0. A tidal generator is designed to capture energy from horizontal tidal currents. Waves involve up/down motion of the water, there is no horizontal movement of any given piece of water. This is why even small boats will bob up and down with the waves but aren't pushed across the water surface by them.
Even if you design a wave generator, go back to the foot pounds to joules conversion described above. A two foot wave contains enough energy to lift a small amount of water two feet, so the energy in any given two foot wave is negligible unless you can capture that energy over an impracticably large with of the wave.
Yes, yes, yes, John Moore, these things are eyesores. Especially when placed in smaller communities.
Ask the Kennedy family why they opposed the offshore wind farm which would have blighted Nantucket Sound. Actually, thank goodness for their self-interested hypocrisy.
Too bad, because still and all these damn things are popping up all over Cape Cod. Too close for comfort and out of scale with the environment. So unlike the wind turbines out in Wyoming etc in the wide open plains.
Here the behemoths loom up out of the stunted, scrub pine woods ruining the environment with industrial apparatus. And the joke is that the capacity that they were designed to replace is still required.
However, even those sited in wide open spaces look horrible and are sometimes in migratory bird flyways and thus butcher magnificent bird life.
Stupid, aggressive, warped choices.
JTW, they are eyesores, I agree. And where I live they are out of scale with the surroundings. Also, as you said, they often are not operating. Just giant industrial sculptures, which in any other iteration would be rejected by the towns' planning, zoning and historical committees.
Yes, that is horrible. But as the author states, the darn wind turbines do not do away with the need for these plants that pollute your air.
Johnmoore, solar is a rotten bag. Solar also destroys life. The huge arrays destroy life in the ground beneath and routinely fries birds in flight.
It would be useful for you to explain what an "industrial gas plant" is for people like me who think you might be referring to natural gas (CH4). My reason is that the combustion products from natural gas are CO2 and water vapor. Combine the two and you get soda water.
So I don't understand what stuff your daughter has to breathe.
Hydro has been fully exploited in the US and is not a general solution to energy storage. You have to have been blessed with it. For example, Oklahoma will not benefit from hydro storage.
Agree. Intermittent sources like solar/wind act like a load on the grid. And load follow is pretty much capped at 30% before the system gets unstable (i.e. uncontrollable).
Just eliminate subsidies across the board and set a Carbon Intensity Per Kilowatt (CIPK) limit on generation. And then let the engineers solve the problem on what type of generation to use.
In the secondary towns in many developing countries, the water supply utility is the biggest user of electric power. They shut down when the power goes off. When they do, the pressure drops in the pipes allowing polluted water in the soil to enter the water supply system. Then when the power gets turned on again the polluted water is delivered to the kitchens in time for breakfast.
"There are grids that successfully run on as much as 100% 'intermittent' for hours or days at time."
Where?
The tidal bore in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada is the most powerful in the world. They built a power generation system to harness the power. And have made fools of themselves.
Thanks for asking!
https://futurism.com/denmark-just-ran-their-entire-country-on-100-wind-energy/
There's nothing quite like a good counterexample to deflate a lie.
http://www.ticotimes.net/2017/02/26/thermal-electricity-costa-rica
Costa Rica uses less than 2% fossil in its grid. Even in miserable weather for wind and solar, its thermal backup is a tiny fraction of its infrastructure.
TheSolutionsProject.org shows the USA can do better.
Really just false. Go here to see what's going on in Europe right now. So although when its really windy at an instant its is possible for Denmark to power their country its not possible for the long term because the grid must be constant. Even fast reacting load follow plants ( e.g. gas combustion turbines, i.e. giant jet engines) have a lag and thus you can't have 100% intermittency. Its just not possible.
Are you really an electrical engineer?
Capacity factors for wind are generally 20-30% if you understand what that is.
http://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=FR
Click on Germany right now and you can see they are importing.
They require 100% back-up.
Windmills are eyesores?
It seems beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A search for images of paintings covering centuries shows windmills to be a central theme of countless artists. Some people must find them beautiful.
Of course, it's hard to find beautiful something that reminds you you're a fossil deadbeat who hasn't paid their debts.
They require 1.88% backup.
Ok ignore. For those of you who are lay people this what you call a troll pretending to be an engineer.
Germany imports power some of the time?
Ooooh. That's so relevant.
Electricity is traded across international borders. That trade lowers the overall cost of grids and the power they supply. It happened when grids had no or next to no renewable. It will happen when grids have 100% renewable.
Your goalpost moving complaints don't make anything I've said false, and do reveal that knowledge deficit isn't the cause of your blindness.
Your fear of paying what you owe for the fossil waste dumping you do is.
Pay what you owe, and cure your eye problems.
Why thank you for self-identifying, though you will not see this reply.
Wind (and solar) aren't built with the intention of covering 100% of a grid; they're most likely to generate power at times when demand peaks, and smart grids are now built to have adjustable demand that comes online when the grid has the most extra generation, such as using storage batteries for EVs, or other applications that can respond to low energy prices at low demand time.
However, some grids can use their 'intermittents' 100% of the time for days at a time, sometimes for a fifth the cost of fossil or less, and getting off fossil with geothermal, geothermal ECS, multiple scales of hydro, and biomass is more and more common mostly because it's far cheaper than fossil.
Anyone pushing fossil right now is hurting the consumer by trying to sell costlier electricity.
Honest engineers don't do that.
In fact, it's in the code of ethics for professional engineers.
You come across as someone who loves them their fossil power.
Is it because you've never paid what you owe for disposing of your fossil wastes, and that secretly thrills you, ripping off your neighbors and taking from them what isn't yours without their consent?
Except everywhere that they do.
The author states a pack of lies.
You must know this.
Eyesores?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=windmill+art
One of my favorite subject is power, also my business, and recently with the Bernie Saunders tour (the all you need is solar/wind guy) I thought I'd poke a big hole in that philosophy. Also Bart R the supposed engineer who thinks all wind/solar will work just fine.
Go here now: (or anytime when its evening in Europe)
http://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=IE
This is a page for Ireland which by the way is very brown (unlike nuclear powered France!) , i.e. high C02 emissions, and you'll also notice its not very windy at the moment. So most of Irelands power is coming from gas, coal and oil! for goodness sakes Thus the entire country is being run on high CO2 emitting fossil fuel right now because wind/solar are not available. Which goes to show that you need 100% back-up of intermittent energy sources or else the lights would go out.
I mentioned this as a sort of "solution" likely to come from public utilities. I did not mention it as a desired solution.
Whether power consumers respond with gas generators, installing batteries, adding water pressure tanks, or whatnot, is irrelevant to the likelihood that public utilities will push the problem off to others. This is especially likely if "renewable" energy gets mandated to represent a growing fraction of power delivered by providers. All the various consumer reactions are possible, and probably desireable as the greens try to demonize "big power."
This post seems to continue to attract comments, so I'll continue as well.
Re: T. Boone Pickens suggestion of using wind power to generate hydrogen
Once you've got hydrogen, you can process it into methane ("methylation") by adding CO2 (perhaps extracted from the air or from a non-fossil-fuel source) which is equivalent to natural gas (natural gas is mostly methane but may contain various impurities, here we end up with pure methane) can be locally stored and later burned in a natural gas power plant or injected into the natural gas distribution network to be used elsewhere or compressed into CNG and used elsewhere. This methylation introduces additional losses but in the near to middle future, methane is more useful in the economy than hydrogen gas.
I spent a bit of time trying to find the cost of wind->methane but best I could find was that a smallish 6 MW plant built for Audi in Germany probably produces methane at a cost around twice the (European) market price for natural gas). However, since you don't need to purify the produced methane so the cost to produce CNG might not be quite so bad compared to natural gas. This plant is also set up to help stabilize the grid by pulling up to 6 MW off the grid if necessary, though that would seem to be working against the cost effectiveness of its own wind farm.
Re: tidal energy
While there is vast amount of tidal energy across the Earth, its very diffuse which is a problem for cost effectiveness, hence the focus on tidal stream energy (which is much more concentrated) but there is a limited amount of it economically viable.
However, just to give an idea how diffuse: tidal amplitude is on average around 54 cm with a cycle time of 12 hours 25 minutes. The change in gravitational potential energy of 1 liter of water at the surface [1] is 1 kg * 9.8 Newtons/kg * 0.54 m = 5.3 joules and the power is 5.3 joules / ((12 hours*60 min/hour + 25 min)*60 sec/min) = 0.00012 watts.
If you're going to be extracting power from this, you're going to need a lot of area. In comparison, maximum solar insolation is roughly 1 Kwatt/m^2. Now, coastal areas funnel the water into larger amplitudes so you're probably looking at up to three times the amplitude in more desirable areas for tidal energy (on the extreme end, the Bay of Fundy is as much as 16.3 m, which only nets you one order of magnitude)
[1] a square of water 1 m long x 1 m wide x 0.1 mm deep
@wreckinball:disqus seems to be dwelling an awful lot on someone he's blocked.
And to crow an awful lot over a limited prototype tool that was designed to show the opposite of his oddly skewed views.
https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap#data-sources
Expand it to include the rest of the world, instead of a couple dozen countries, and to compare year by year to show the progress being made side by side, and then you'll see what isn't being told you. Include projects like the French-Irish offshore wind agreement to map the future, and you'll see even more that the foot-dragging claims of fossil waste dumpers are so much smoke and mirrors.
35 years ago, the feats of stable renewable grid power shown in that map would have been considered physically impossible by electrical engineers. Working to transform the legacies of the old European grid infrastructure takes time, and Poland, Estonia and many others are not committed to that change politically. However, you can see the effects of those who are committed, and are succeeding, and saving money for their electricity consumers to do it.
Costa Rica got by on 1.88% fossil back-up, mainly because it had ample geothermal electric and hydro in place, in 2016. 1.88% is a long way from the 100% claim you're being fed by this fossil huckster.
He even thinks the 20%-30% Capacity Factor (CF) of wind is an argument against it. When it takes years or decades to get one of his fossil plants off the ground, during which time CF is zero, while wind goes up in weeks or at most months (and nuclear can take decades, as in the case of Canada's really wonky Ontario Hydro), the CF argument is not in his favor.
And when you cycle down your least cost effective -- fossil -- capacity in favor of your lowest cost -- wind, solar, geothermal -- power, you find the CF of fossil is just not competitive.
Not to mention the CF of the next coming wave of airborne wind power is double that of land-based.
Why are you listening to this guy?
Warren, stop having such long breaks between posts! You are my favorite blogger. MOAR
So,if you are correct then you will be OK if the RET is stopped?Take that away and watch these"parasites"in the wind industry DISAPPEAR.
One must say clearly that de facto we redistribute the world's wealth by climate policy…. One has to rid oneself of the illusion that international climate politics have anything to do with environmental concerns.”
14 November 2010, Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
So,that means that she knows that there isn't any need for"Bird Mincers"on this planet.CO2 RULES.
Go and have a look at what is happening in South Australia.
“The greatest wilderness is between a Greenies’ ears”(TdeF@jo nova)
Get rid of the RET and watch these"Wind Shysters"disappear.
All the subsidies. All the entitlements. All the protectionism of fossil or of wind. All the easing of health and safety standards that wouldn't be allowed if Mexico dumped that sort of toxin over the border.
You want to tell Texas that its wind power is subsidized?
You want to tell Wyoming?
(Well, it's true in the case of Texas, but they divert most of their renewable subsidies to fossil infrastructure, and I think it'd be funny to watch that discussion in any event.)
You still vomiting up that old bad translation from seven years ago?
Edenhofer was saying that governments have been de facto redistributing the world's wealth to fossil through subsidy and entitlements -- over $5.3 Trillion a year worldwide, a fourth of that in the USA alone.
He was saying the climate politics of the world were being blocked by fossil special interests.
Thanks for playing.
Actually, Figueres was talking about ending the influence of Mercantilists and Free Riding parasites, not Capitalists.
You think we've had global capitalism for 150 years?
The globe is a festering swamp of privateers, opportunists, rent-seekers and corporate communists.
Mince on your own time, in the privacy of your own thoughts.
Pay what you owe.
Odd red herrings do not interest.
If you're still claiming there's a problem with wind in South Australia, you've failed to read the official report of investigators into the cause of the blackout there.. or to notice that there have been blackouts in fossil systems for decades that can't be blamed on wind.
The only green I'm interested in is the color of the money I save as a customer on renewable.
The three lowest-cost grids in North America are renewable.
He means nuclear, clive.
He's demanding standards that he thinks nuclear would prosper under.
Which is pretty silly of him.
Geothermal would win for the Western half of the US population, and hydroelectric for the Eastern half.. because that's the solution engineers have understood for decades.
"
industrial gas plant
"
What gas do they produce? 02? something else? Or is this a power station that you refering to?
What sort of danger does this pose to your daughter?
Why are pissed off that people are using electricity to have light?
"
Thermal coal would have collapsed in the USA a quarter century ago if not for the largest subsidy and entitlements program in the world.
"
http://environmentblog.ncpa.org/which-energy-source-receives-the-largest-subsidy/#sthash.ZLB5kdRm.dpbs
Energy Source Subsidy per kwh
Coal $0.0006
Natural Gas and Petroleum Liquids $0.0006
Nuclear $0.0031
Renewables $0.0154
Biomass Power $0.0020
Geothermal $0.0125
Hydroelectric $0.0008
Solar $0.9680
Wind $0.0525
Coal receives about 6/100ths of a cent per kWh while solar receives an enormous 96.8 cents per kWh. Wind receives 5.25 cents per kWh and nuclear receives just under 1/3 of a cent per kWh
- See more at: http://environmentblog.ncpa.org/which-energy-source-receives-the-largest-subsidy/#sthash.ZLB5kdRm.dpuf
"
The three lowest-cost grids in North America are renewable.
"
For an en engineer, you're pretty sloppy with the terms you throw around.