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.
Germany's spent over a trillion dollars on renewable generation CAPACITY during the last decade. How much ---> total KwH <--- of energy do they get from it? 8%.
That shouldn't be surprising.
Renewable energy make suburban sprawl look like Hong Kong.
Renewables energy is S P R A W L.
It would take a wind farm literally the size of Wisconsin, and at that a new one of this size built every single frickin year, to meet energy demand increases in the US. That's just demand; not cutting into existing use.
I'm all for leveling Wisconsin. I suspect most people are not.
That's not a red herring. The grid wasn't ran on renewables. There was a period of time where their total output was equivalent to a few days worth of juice. That doesn't mean that each and every moment it was 100% pure renewable. Electricity is a wave. You do realize this right?
Germany has enough name-plate capacity in solar energy installed to provide 2/3 of it's annual electricity needs. How much actual electricity each year does it generate? 4% of their yearly use.
One can not run a grid on that, no matter how much their narcissim tells them that they're righter than right.
I'll pay you for the damaged my carbon emissions due to you once you pay me for the improvements my carbon emissions make to all the plants in your life.
"
shut down the grid until the fossil fuel peaking generators can spin up.
"
They can spin 24/7. I don't see the point.
As for those Tesla __batteries__ you'll need to be buying a couple of those a year for just your house under your plan. Do you really want to be shelling out $8k - $13k every year for batteries?
Those that aren't stripping the forests bare for wood for the fires they have in their houses.
Per kWh means what, exactly?
Obstacles to entry on the Market don't come per kWh, but accumulate to the players that have been around longest.
Also, see the phrase "largest subsidy and entitlements program" and compare it to the total bunkum you've provided from the coal-funded NCPA.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
Coal gets ten times as much in tax expenditure as in direct subsidy. It gets three times as much in R&D. Half again as much from specific electricity subsidy. Protections from lawsuits. Immunity to prosecution. Grants of land. Accelerated depletion allowances. Coal seam subsidies and entitlements listed under natural gas. As much again listed under transmission and grid. Fifty times as much listed under end use.
Much of the basis for these figures is highly questionable estimation, tending to inflate renewable spend often by reassigning figures from fossil spend.
And oil's no better.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/12/us-taxpayers-subsidising-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-companies
So really, no sale.
By all means, if you have a clarification to ask about, ask about it instead of handwaving and whinging.
The lowest cumulative cost to ordinary grid and industrial consumers in NA are seen in primarily hydroelectric grid systems.
Oh, and that's before you pay what you owe for your fossil waste dumping.
Renewable energy is distributed? Sure. That's S P R A W L. It's also domestic, secure and provides work closer to home for professionals in the industry.
Your wind farm the size of Wisconsin myth is just that. Wind isn't baseload; it is most available when peak demand is highest, and far cheaper per kWh to produce in a mixed-source grid system.
And while I'm with you about leveling Wisconsin, they call that Iowa.
As for Germany; wow. Germany's total energy spend in the last decade?
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/capital-projects-infrastructure/publications/cpi-outlook/assets/cpi-outlook-to-2025.pdf
Your figures appear to be lies.
It was a red herring to my claim.
Is the world there yet, on fossil-free grids? Clearly not.
Is a world of fossil-free grids possible? Clearly.
And it would cost consumers less.
Who said damage?
(Though there is damage.)
Fossil waste disposal encumbers the weathering and sequestering capacity of private lands. That encumberance takes what belongs to private land owners without compensation to us. That's simple theft. Privatize fossil waste disposal, enforce collection of fossil waste disposal charges from the fossil industry, and Capitalism is satisfied. Fail, and you hurt the economy.
Why do you hate Capitalism?
As for 'improvements' to my plants?
How dare you force feed your wastes to what is mine and claim to be providing a benefit?!
Jump out of a dark alley and 'improve' a stranger from behind without permission, and that's assault.
Ireland still very brown. So is Germany and Denmark?
http://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=IE®ion=Europe
How could that be? Gee could it be that intermittent weather driven sources need fossil back-up. And yes lets base our power grid on what works for Costa Rica.
You came back.
Ireland is comparable to Costa Rica; why do you get to base the grid on the one, but I can't do it from the other?
British Columbia's power grid is 98% renewable. Is that close enough to home for you?
Your cherry picks don't impress.
The article argues that you don't much reduce backup when you add wind to a grid.
That's barely close to true if you narrow the framing of your question to just the assumption that your grid has to be fossil, has to be expensive, and has to ignore options that bring down its cost while enhancing service to future customers.
EV owners will want plenty of intermittent power at lower cost per kWh because they can store power and don't mind getting it at odd times of the day.
Storage is coming on line not because wind needs storage but because water management infrastructure is needed to handle increasing flood conditions, increasing need to fight drought, increasing need for irrigation, and the marginal returns on those projects from pumped hydro is financially attractive when there's plenty of low-cost intermittent to store.
Heck, your own favorite website was built to track progress toward renewable. https://github.com/tmrowco
A decade ago it'd have been all black. Now it's brown through green with a bit of black in Estonia.
Oh, and look at all the potential that can still be tapped: http://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=true&solar=true®ion=europe&page=map
All you seem to want to do is whinge about obstacles.
There's two kinds of engineers. The ones that build the stuff that causes the problems, and the ones that fix the stuff that causes the problems.
You ever want to switch teams to the side that fixes the problems you've been creating, feel free.
You do seem to make up a lot of your claims.
Ever consider working from facts?
Well, if you don't understand, rather than guess and expect to be handed things on a silver platter, why didn't you just Google it?
I mean, if your taxes pay for the EPA, you might as well use its services.
Sure are a lot of dim bulbs eager to display their lack of grasp of facts.
Come to think of it, I think we can compute exactly how much potential energy is available from tides. It's the gravitational potential energy of the water from low tide to high tide. (though proving this is more than I want to spend on a comment to a blog post)
So, for a 1 m^2 area of ocean, the maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from one cycle of tidal energy is
int_0^{amplitude of tide} {{1m * 1m * density of water} g x dx}
For practical purposes, the density of water and g are constants, so that makes it
energy = {density of water} * g * 1/2 {amplitude of tide}^2
Plugging in the numbers: 1 m^2 * 1000 kg/m^3 * 9.8 N/kg * 0.5 * (0.54 m)^2 = 1.4 KJ
However, putting in an amplitude of 1.5 m results in 11 KJ
However, a cycle time of 44,700 seconds => 0.031 watts per square meter for average tide or 0.25 watts per square meter for coastal tides. Bay of Fundy tides: 29 watts/m^2. You are going to need to take advantage of a large area. I think you'd be better off with tidal stream power even at the Bay of Fundy. Existing tidal stream generators are already in 100s of kW.
Hey Bart_R! A few quick points: First, you seem to have misunderstood Frederick Colbourne's point. He was pointing out that the phrase "industrial gas plant" is not clearly defined. What exactly does it mean? When I google it (as you suggested) here is what it brings up: https://www.google.com/search?q=industrial+gas+plant&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Maybe that means a gas fired generating plant or boilers. Maybe it does not. Certainly the google results do not support that idea. Second, your cut-and-paste exercise from the EPA tells us approximately nothing about what those various emissions do to humans. Without percentages and concentrations there is no way to know what health effects the use of gas fired boiler causes. OK, so burning natural gas releases NOx and CO... How much? One part in ten? One part in a billion? It makes a difference.
And last, and most importantly, being snarky does not endear any fence-sitters to your side of the discussion.Seriously, (and I mean this kindly and as a potential friend), the subjects of pollution, alternative energy, climate change, and science in general -- these are not simple subjects. It might be productive for all of us to remember that those who disagree with us are not necessarily stupid, lazy or evil. Even things we accept as fact may still be questionable or ambiguous in their effects.
Hey, @jasoncalley:disqus thanks for the observations.
It's always nice to be accused of misunderstanding, by anyone who misunderstood my points, because the simple remedy is for them to READ HARDER.
@frederickcolbourne:disqus was clearly using an ill-will reading out of context to exploit an ambiguity, being disingenuous.
While I'm well aware that the dose makes the poison, and any search of MSDS data for the chemicals identified amply addresses your entitled Nanny-State-dependent whinge that the EPA was under-informative, really why would anyone want to follow your red herrings further down the rabbit-hole of infinite regress by changing the topic?
While your meaning may be whatever it is, I'm not really looking for friends on the Internet; there are apparently dating websites for that if you're lonely.
I'm being snarky at someone being snarky, regardless of their feelings, and factual at someone being facetious, because my intention is to see people collect what they're owed for the fossil waste dumping people do.
Whatever ambiguity you might be in the mood to enlarge rather than seeking resolution to an issue already dragging on for six decades and getting worse due fossil deadbeats refusing to face their fossil disposal debt doesn't interest me.
You can waste that time on your own.
Just pay what you owe for the fossil waste disposal you use from the lands of others; then you'll be better than a friend: You'll be out of debt.
"British Columbia's power grid is 98% renewable"
It's mostly hydropower, not wind or solar. BC is nearly unique in the combination of topography and high rainfall that enables . Hydropower is distinguishable from wind and solar in two ways:
-- It can be turned on or off when the power is needed, rather than varying with the weather and the time of day. As far as stabilizing the grid is concerned, it's similar to steam plants or gas turbo-generators. (I don't know how quickly the typical water powered dynamos can be brought up or shut down, but I see no technical obstacles to building them so they could respond to grid fluctuations in a few minutes, enabling them to be used as the backup for unstable wind and solar sources. It would probably cost more...)
-- It requires dams and reservoirs, which are ecological insults on a massive scale. AFAIK, all hydropower in the USA or other first world countries is based on dams that were built long ago, when environmental impact was not considered in planning projects. It would be impossible to construct a new hydropower project in the USA today.
So BC's success with hydropower says nothing about the workability of other renewables in other parts of the world.
Ohboy. Someone who understands that hydro power is indeed renewable, too!
While BC has hardly any solar to speak of, and remarkably slow uptake of wind or geothermal -- the government actively discourages the huge geothermal potential of BC, even though it is over 20% cheaper than hydro -- sneering at all hydro is a mistake.
The longstanding US Army Corps of Engineers estimate is that roughly thirty times as much hydro at all scales from micro- on up is available in the USA as is deployed, and fully half of that feasible.
True, the other half is indeed the ecological insult you seem to think all improvements to watercourses somehow must be -- not counting additional pumped hydro opportunities.
This estimate is often disputed by similar arguments to yours, but that sort of argument seems to only come from the restraint-of-trade naysayers, not consumers who would dearly love 15% cheaper electricity, and lower cost of erosion-reducing, crop-saving water management infrastructure by shifting the burden to revenue-generating electric power.
By the way, 'first world' was never really a thing, except by back-formation from 'third world', a deprecated term. Experts these days prefer 'emerging markets', as it sounds less colonial and patronizing.
BC's building a new major dam to expand its current production capacity at Site C, just another thing about the world you appear not to know. And while Site C is likely a mistake so long as there is so much cheaper geothermal in the ground and so much wind potential, it does show that dam-building still goes on on a far too massive scale, while cheaper alternatives go overlooked.
Still, back to the point: typically as much as two thirds of grid demand is so highly variable that additional backup in some form is necessary; wind and solar peak just about the same time of day as demand peaks, but they are variable and so can't be entirely relied on, though their presence in the power mix dramatically drops the price per kWh a grid delivers; UHVDC supergrids, 'smartgrids', EV storage, pumped hydro and pumped geothermal storage, and biofuel plants all more than adequately service projected needs in North America.
Check out TheSolutionsProject.Org for details any layman can grasp.
"I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate," Buffet told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska recently. "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
Warren Buffet
Good thing you aren't looking for friends here.
That is NOT what thy look like in reality. Sheesh.
You live in California, don''t you?
You, sir, are a self-righteous blowhard trying to impress all here as superior because of your love affair with a politically correct fuel source that is proving to be expensive, noisy, inefficient, unreliable and unlovely. Wind has its place and pleases progressives, but it can not ever power a steel foundry. It cannot power a power-hungry nation,and it won't pull the world's poor out of their misery, but that is lost on the virtue-signalers such as yourself.
Define that for me and I will consider it, but it is not to you it is owed, and if it were, you can starve waiting for it.
Why are you still here? my God you are repellent.
Have you paid? Do enlighten us all with your virtue.
Ever consider jumping off a bridge? Right now would be a particularly propitious time. I'll hold your coat. Oh please?
Are you so lonely that you are looking for friends _here_?
That is, with all deference to our host, very sad.
Pay what you owe.
Fossil deadbeats always miss any point that points in the direction of them paying what they owe in reality.
*Bzzzt*
Wrong guess red herring.
Your drivel-by one-liners are noted for how off-base and pointless they are; your true talents are wasted here, and you ought consider moving up to the big leagues of shouting obscenities out the passenger window at pedestrians in hospital zones. I understand you can get Uber for that.
Pay what you owe.
Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.
Argument by abuse is a waste of breath.
Waste breath on your own time.
Pay what you owe for the fossil waste dumping you do.
Hey, there's this great thing about Disqus that lets you not read any fact or reasoning that conflicts with your narrow views and allows you to keep ignoring the fossil debt you keep growing: close your eyes and look away.
Or you can grow up and pay what you owe.
A man finds a wallet in the street and returns its contents intact, he's called an honest citizen; some deadbeat finds a wallet on the street and says "define that for me and I will consider it."
Of course it's not me alone who is owed, and your fraction of what is owed to me is such a rounding error on a penny that no one would notice it. What you owe is to land owners whose private property weathers and sequesters your fossil wastes back to mineral form for you. You take those goods without the landlords' consent, and in many cases against their express wishes and to their loss.
Have you even tried to figure out how much those goods are worth, or how to pay?
Or did you just say, "Define that for me and I will consider it"?
Complain that there are people in the world who aren't deadbeats on your own time.
Pay what you owe.
Drivel-by one-liner argument by abuse. Typical fossil deadbeat.
Pay what you owe.
Tell me what that is I owe, along with everyone else on this forum you charge with a debt, how you and apparently only you knows that amount, what authority you have to tell me anything at all, and how you intend to collect whatever imaginary and wholly arbitrary debt you think I owe, considering your incivility to anyone who counters your words. And what you think you could even do about it if I choose to not come back to read your tiresome and wholly predictable codswallop. None of what you replied above is relevant to my remark in any case.
I have no acquaintance with fossil deadbeats so your remark is missing the point I made.
Argument by abuse is a waste of breath.
Waste breath on your own time.
Tell me what that is I owe, along with everyone else on this forum you
charge with a debt, how you and apparently only you knows that amount,
what authority you have to tell me anything at all, and how you intend
to collect whatever imaginary and wholly arbitrary debt you think I owe,
considering your incivility to anyone who counters your words. And what
you think you could even do about it if I choose to not come back to
read your tiresome and wholly predictable codswallop.
Still the needy Nanny-State-dependent, demanding everything on a silver platter; just like any other fossil deadbeat.
Who said I know the amount?
As for your aversion to being told things you don't know; you imagine I care if you wallow in ignorance?
Your debt is neither imaginary nor arbitrary. It comes from you taking scarce fossil waste disposal from others against their will without paying when you dump fossil wastes freely and of your own choice.
What can I do about your immoral, backwards, thievish ways?
I can take comfort in the punitive nature of your judicial system, and how much what goes around comes around.
You thought you made a point?
#FAIL there.
https://youtu.be/BxKfpt70rLI
Pay what you owe.
Repetitive blah-blah-blah is just blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.
Pay what you owe.
Your accusation is without proof or merit.
Tell me what that is I owe, along with everyone else on this forum you
charge with a debt, how you and apparently only you knows that amount,
what authority you have to tell me anything at all, and how you intend
to collect whatever imaginary and wholly arbitrary debt you think I owe,
considering your incivility to anyone who counters your words. And what
you think you could even do about it if I choose to not come back to
read your tiresome and wholly predictable codswallop. None of what you
replied above is relevant to my remark in any case.
So again, tell me what that is I owe, along with everyone else on this forum you
charge with a debt, how you and apparently only you knows that amount,
what authority you have to tell me anything at all, and how you intend
to collect whatever imaginary and wholly arbitrary debt you think I owe,
considering your incivility to anyone who counters your words. And what
you think you could even do about it if I choose to not come back to
read your tiresome and wholly predictable codswallop. None of what you
replied above is relevant to my remark in any case.
Have you paid? Do enlighten us all with your virtue and tell us how you have paid your debt.
You love it. You keep coming back.
Have you paid? Do enlighten us all with your virtue.
I'm going back to reading Warren's posts. He makes sense and he doesn't make false accusations or harass his readers. I vastly prefer civility in discussions, it helps people see reason and enlightens both sides. This has been mildly diverting but life is too short to carry this further.
One-liner drivel by snark is not paying what you owe.
Just like a fossil deadbeat.