Opposition to wind power used to be the province of NIMBY’s who quailed at the supposed intrusion into their viewsheds and soundsheds. No more. Wind power is big — its share of U.S. electricity reached 1.3% last year — and getting bigger fast enough to alarm the Far Right and other feeders at the trough of coal and nuclear.
The latest poke at wind was posted yesterday on the American Spectator blog, and it’s a doozy:
[W]ind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.
Translated: wind turbines, with running costs of zero, will cause fossil units with running costs of several cents or more per kWh to be used less. Bummer!
But a bummer with ironic echoes from the 1970s, when nuke plants similarly displaced coal- and oil-fired units that cost more to run. The fossil units’ capacity factors went to hell, but the plant owners didn’t complain since their backs were covered by “rate-base” provisions guarded by utility “regulators.” Now that power deregulation has lifted the protection, look who’s complaining — the guys who masterminded it.
Of course, to the American Spectator and their brethren at the Wall Street Journal,
All this is being driven entirely by government mandates and subsidies. In America, wind gets a 1.8-cents-per-kilowatt-hour federal tax credit.
The horror! Coal plants get a free ride for mountaintop maiming and climate clobbering. Reactors got subsidies up the wazoo, including almost $20 billion in federal R&D just to get them to the point in the late sixties where their share of U.S. electricity could reach the level that wind reached last year) — and they still get a free pass on insurance. But those dreadful wind turbines get 1.8 cents/kWh (actually, 1.9 cents). How unspeakable.
Wait, it gets worse, according to the Spectator:
[Y]ou can never count on wind. You can’t even predict it from hour to hour with 100 percent accuracy and the windiest sites can go calm for days. On a national electrical grid, where supply and demand must be kept within 5 percent or each other in order to maintain voltage balances, this becomes very disruptive.
Baloney. Study after study by grid operators and transmission experts has found that wind turbines place little or no strain on system reliability until wind power’s penetration reaches 20% or more. Partly it’s because
if a wind generator is operating at a certain level at present, there is an 80 percent probability that it will be operating within ±10 percent of that level one hour from now. And, there is a 60 percent probability that it will be operating within ±10 percent of that level five hours from now.
That’s not me talking, it’s the CEO of PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization that coordinates wholesale electricity flows in a region of the east-central U.S. reaching into 13 states. Indeed, the output from wind turbines is constant enough that many grid operators here and abroad are now assigning “capacity credits” equivalent to 20% of the turbine peak ratings, thus putting the lie to the Spectator‘s claim that wind displaces zero fossil capacity.
What’s more, grid rules already provide sufficient synchronized reserve and regulation reserve to compensate for most short-term fluctuations in both demand and supply. The lone new burden that wind farms impose on power grids is for extra supplemental reserve from fossil units that must be kept ready, and the resulting energy-inefficiency is modest: an average of 5 to 10 percent of the fossil fuels that would have been burned generating the energy provided by the wind turbines.
For details on this last point and others here, please see the new 11-page paper I’ve posted on my Web site. It debunks not only the Spectator‘s canard that wind farms will destabilize the grids but also the old NIMBY nonsense that wind generation doesn’t displace fossil fuels.
Note: My nuclear subsidies figure in the text is calculated from Table 13 of my 1992 report for Greenpeace, Fiscal Fission. 1950-1969 expenditures for Federal R&D for Conventional Fission sum to$12.7 billion in 1990 dollars, or $19.0 billion in 2008 dollars. Nuclear power’s share of U.S. electricity generation in 1969 was 1.2%, or slightly less than wind’s 1.3% in 2008.
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Comments
View as Flat
ericr Posted 3:19 pm
23 Apr 2009
106) wind energy received $23.37 per
megawatt-hour of its electricity production in 2007, compared with
44 cents for coal, $1.59 for nuclear, and 25 cents for natural gas (the
three main sources of electricity in the U.S.).The American Spectator article was actually commenting on a much more detailed article in Platt's Insight about large amounts of wind on the European grid. Essentially, since -- even according to the European Wind Energy Assocation -- wind turbines are idle 15-30% of the time and are nondispatchable, reserve capacity has to not only remain in toto as if the wind turbines aren't there, but also be increased to handle the event of a large wind drop-off (as happened in Texas early last year, I think it was). Just yesterday, Reuters wrote that Scottish Power is warning that plans to build 30 gigawatts of wind plant will also require building perhaps 25 gigawatts of new back-up power. On March 24, T. Boone Pickens admitted at a forum in Ohio that without large-scale battery storage, wind isn't going to replace natural gas as his "Plan" claims. In fact, it will drive building more natural gas plants, since those are the ones that can respond most quickly to the fluctuations of the wind.So not only is wind driving extra build-up of power generation besides its own tremendous land requirements, it is also forcing other sources to run less efficiently as they fill in the highly variable and intermittent wind production -- like city vs. highway driving.The illusion in Europe is that only a few countries have high wind "penetration": Denmark, Spain, and Germany. And they are connected to larger international grids to better absorb the wind production. Denmark's wind, for example, represents less than 1% of the electricity on the international grids it is part of.The simple measure is not displacement or share of electricity but how much fossil fuel is burned to get a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Nobody has ever been able to show that figure going down as wind is added. (I throw out that statement as a challenge.)
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ericr Posted 3:35 pm
23 Apr 2009
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Charles Komanoff Posted 6:54 pm
23 Apr 2009
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ericr Posted 7:01 am
24 Apr 2009
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Charles Komanoff Posted 12:42 pm
24 Apr 2009
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ericr Posted 2:40 pm
24 Apr 2009
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Orng Crush Posted 2:43 pm
27 Apr 2009
No alternative energy source will ever beat pollution-belching fossil fuel sources without help. We spent generations building up our nation around fossil fuels. We are perfectly designed to take advantage of fossil fuels. Wind can’t break into that monopoly without help. It needs equipment, transmission and everything else that coal, nat. gas and others have, and even then it will need help.
But it’s worth it. We have priorities beyond simple economics driving these efforts.
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ericr Posted 10:46 am
17 May 2009
57.41 - 64.54 - 61.63 - 59.49 - 65.07 - 69.56 - 72.87 - 75.07 - 60.29 - 57.86 - 54.72 - 56.28 - 53.36 - 62.02 - 56.57 - 51.93 - 59.13The first string of values is Danish wind energy production from 1990 to 2006, in millions of kilowatt-hours, according to the Danish Energy Agency: http://www.ens.dk/sw34512.aspThe second string is total Danish CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2006, in millions of metric tons, according to the Energy Information Administration: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xlsIf what we are told about wind energy is true, then the second string of values should have declined as steadily as the 1st string rose. But clearly, there is very little, if any, correlation between the two.
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