Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on October 7, 2012
Big Wind Energy: A Green Fantasy of Destruction
Leftist greens fantasise of replacing all nuclear and fossil fuel power plants with big wind farms and big solar energy arrays. But there is a huge problem with that approach, which if pursued will lead to a drastic reduction in available electric power and a general impoverishment of any society that proceeds too far.
The most that big wind, for example, can safely contribute to a modern power grid, is between 6% and 20%, at the most.
The analysis reported in this study indicates that 20% would be the extreme upper limit for wind penetration…
Very high wind penetrations are not achievable in practice due to the increased need for power storage, the decrease in grid reliability, and the increased operating costs. Given these constraints, this study concludes that a more practical upper limit for wind penetration is 10%.… _Reason Foundation
The Korchinski Report “The Limits of Wind Power” (PDF)
More:
…wind turbines by themselves do not add electrical capacity to a grid. They must be paired with other generators of equivalent power to compensate for wind variations and for the stability of the electricity grid.
This pairing—wind and backup—has limits because of the huge rapid variability of wind that must be compensated for by the backup power source. It is estimated that this pairing can account for only 20 percent of the capacity of the grid. This means that wind can be only 6 percent of the generation (.20 x .3). This limit has already been reached in Europe by countries such as Germany and Denmark. _Ulrich Decher PhD
In addition to Germany and Denmark, other countries under EU environmental laws and regulations — including the UK — are in danger of entering the blackout zone via a green dysfunction of faux environmental zeal.
Al Fin began his exploration of energy with a strong a priori belief in support of both big wind and big solar energy. In the course of teaching himself about energy, he assisted a number of installations of home-scale wind, solar, and micro-hydro systems. These projects were educational as well as fun. People who are willing to work to build off-grid small scale power can be fun to be around, and often know how to party.
But there is a huge difference between using wind (and solar) for off-grid residencies, and attempting to use large-scale wind as a large proportion of total energy generating capacity for a finely balanced continental power grid. That is the lesson that Al Fin had to learn, and which modern societies must now learn — before they destroy themselves in pursuit of impossibilities.
Good intentions can make one feel good about himself, but hard-headed, knowledge-based policy is what will keep a society prosperous and healthy. Green policies — such as the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast policies promoted by the US Obama administration, the Julia Gillard government in Australia, or any one of a number of European governments (and the EU in general) — will eventually destroy a society through energy starvation and impoverishment. Such societies eventually pollute the air, water, and soil in far more damaging ways than societies which were allowed by prosperity to move up the energy technology curve — eventually arriving at safe, clean, and abundant sources of reliable and predictable power supplies.
Ideological efforts to short-circuit that trajectory of development — such as modern green leftist ideologies — will doom any societies which adopt them to ultimate failure.
Wind energy is unpredictably intermittent — and thus unreliable. It is also enormously expensive in terms of materials, land, money, and other scarce resources.
Big wind will take any problem you are trying to solve — and make it worse.
The renewable energy industry cannot survive without massive government handouts and stimulus. As economic slowdowns settle over Europe, the US, China, etc., governments can not afford to be as generous to big wind and big solar as in the heady days of economic booms and bubbles. Consequently, the renewables industry is beginning to suffer.
It is fine to hold strong opinions. But make sure that they are backed up with something stronger than good intentions. Parts of this article were adapted from an earlier Al Fin Energy piece.
Al FinLeftist greens fantasise of replacing all nuclear and fossil fuel power plants with big wind farms and big solar energy arrays. But there is a huge problem with that approach, which if pursued will lead to a drastic reduction in available electric power and a general impoverishment of any society that proceeds too far.
The most that big wind, for example, can safely contribute to a modern power grid, is between 6% and 20%, at the most.
The analysis reported in this study indicates that 20% would be the extreme upper limit for wind penetration…
Very high wind penetrations are not achievable in practice due to the increased need for power storage, the decrease in grid reliability, and the increased operating costs. Given these constraints, this study concludes that a more practical upper limit for wind penetration is 10%.… _Reason Foundation
The Korchinski Report “The Limits of Wind Power” (PDF)
More:
…wind turbines by themselves do not add electrical capacity to a grid. They must be paired with other generators of equivalent power to compensate for wind variations and for the stability of the electricity grid.
This pairing—wind and backup—has limits because of the huge rapid variability of wind that must be compensated for by the backup power source. It is estimated that this pairing can account for only 20 percent of the capacity of the grid. This means that wind can be only 6 percent of the generation (.20 x .3). This limit has already been reached in Europe by countries such as Germany and Denmark. _Ulrich Decher PhD
In addition to Germany and Denmark, other countries under EU environmental laws and regulations — including the UK — are in danger of entering the blackout zone via a green dysfunction of faux environmental zeal.
Al Fin began his exploration of energy with a strong a priori belief in support of both big wind and big solar energy. In the course of teaching himself about energy, he assisted a number of installations of home-scale wind, solar, and micro-hydro systems. These projects were educational as well as fun. People who are willing to work to build off-grid small scale power can be fun to be around, and often know how to party.
But there is a huge difference between using wind (and solar) for off-grid residencies, and attempting to use large-scale wind as a large proportion of total energy generating capacity for a finely balanced continental power grid. That is the lesson that Al Fin had to learn, and which modern societies must now learn — before they destroy themselves in pursuit of impossibilities.
Good intentions can make one feel good about himself, but hard-headed, knowledge-based policy is what will keep a society prosperous and healthy. Green policies — such as the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast policies promoted by the US Obama administration, the Julia Gillard government in Australia, or any one of a number of European governments (and the EU in general) — will eventually destroy a society through energy starvation and impoverishment. Such societies eventually pollute the air, water, and soil in far more damaging ways than societies which were allowed by prosperity to move up the energy technology curve — eventually arriving at safe, clean, and abundant sources of reliable and predictable power supplies.
Ideological efforts to short-circuit that trajectory of development — such as modern green leftist ideologies — will doom any societies which adopt them to ultimate failure.
Wind energy is unpredictably intermittent — and thus unreliable. It is also enormously expensive in terms of materials, land, money, and other scarce resources.
Big wind will take any problem you are trying to solve — and make it worse.
The renewable energy industry cannot survive without massive government handouts and stimulus. As economic slowdowns settle over Europe, the US, China, etc., governments can not afford to be as generous to big wind and big solar as in the heady days of economic booms and bubbles. Consequently, the renewables industry is beginning to suffer.
It is fine to hold strong opinions. But make sure that they are backed up with something stronger than good intentions. Parts of this article were adapted from an earlier Al Fin Energy piece.
17 Comments on "Big Wind Energy: A Green Fantasy of Destruction"
Arthur on Sun, 7th Oct 2012 10:16 pm
Al Fin does not realize that nothing is going to be like it used to be. Energy supply intermittent? Sure! The consequence will be that you will work when the wind blows or the sun shines, just like the millers in the middle ages. We wasted the opportunity we got in the early seventies, when we were warned by the Club of Rome. If we had acted then, a somewhat smooth transition maybe had been possible, but we blew it.
deedl on Sun, 7th Oct 2012 10:45 pm
The report this article bases on has false assumptions, the first being the nature of the grid, the second being the nature of demand.
Maybe todays grids can’t handle more than 20% wind. But the grids will develop with the expansion of wind power, tomorrows grids will be different from todays grids. There are no reasons why this should not be acomplished. Its an engineering problem and of course you have to pay the update of the grids.
Today there is little interconnection between demand peak times and electricity cost, because electricity is still cheap and has little price fluctuation. With the increase of intermittend electricity production, prices will become volatile and both private and industrial demand will follow prices therefore demand will follow the intermittency of production.
So in a economy with more than 20% windpower, the grids will handle the power and demand will follow production. Problem solved.
BillT on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 12:18 am
Dream on boys. Renewables are NOT renewable. How many of them can produce enough NET energy to mine the ores, refine them, manufacture the parts, assemble them, ship them to wherever, and instal and maintain them for their useful life? None! ALL require oil energy to exist. ALL of them. When the oil is gone or too expensive, EROEI, the renewables will fade away as they wear out and stop working, never to be replaced.
Tech is NOT going to save your wasteful lifestyle Americans! You are going to learn to live on the 4 1/2% of the world’s resources just like the other 6,700,000,000+ people on this earth. Get used to that idea and stop dreaming of ‘what ifs’!
Who Knows on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 5:56 am
While I agree with a lot of your info BillT you have one of the most negative views on life. I don’t think 6,700,000,000 people live on 4 1/2%. Maybe some do but not all. Even most of these people living on 4 1/2% are getting something from oil and The wests consumption. We all need to make sacrifices and life adjustments, on that I agree.
When the population is much lower than now there will be plenty of resources already dug up and ready for use in all the empty cities.
I enjoy your posts much more when you talk about how you have changed your habits and life. It is really hard for most people to come to terms with what is happening.
deedl on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 6:36 am
@BillT:
You are a Don Quichote fighting windmills. I am not sure if you read and understood my post. I argued that demand will follow production. I am not sure if you can grasp the implications of this statement, but it is surely not a dreamfully going on with a wasteful lifestyle.
BTW: All your arguments about the use of oil follow the problem of induction, which means you are concluding from a special case to the universal case, which is not logically correct. If you list stuff that is accomplished by oil, the only correct conclusion is, that it can be done by oil. It is a false induction to conclude, that it has to be done in any case by oil.
Arthur on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 6:47 am
The problem of intermittency can also be countered by integrating large economic areas like the EU and US. In Europe we have a situation, where surplus electricity from Holland is used at night to pump up water in Norwegian mountain reservoirs. Likewise, water from Switzerland can be used and is used to backup failure of a power plant whereever in Europe. Moreover, the larger the integrated area, the bigger is the chance that low wind in area A can be compensated by strong wind somewhere else.
Smart grids are indeed a necessity in a situation where we both need a means of rationing as well as to adapt to a situation where there are many small scale producers, but it is getting of the ground real slow. Here is an example of an implementation concerning a (meager) 25 houses:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/06/06/1st-real-world-smart-grid-of-its-size-in-the-netherlands/
I would like to know if there have been larger projects realized.
Norm on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 6:55 am
Agree. Windmills are a delirious pipe dream of the far left. What’s sad is so many of the big windmills are being installed, and they are fantastically ugly. Environmental uglification on a colossal scale, and the lefties are the ones doing it.
Little itty bitty baby windmills are more reasonable. Stuff that is sized to where the individual homeowner can manage it. Thats a more realistic approach, and they aren’t visible from 30 miles away.
‘Smart grid’ is also a scam. The lefty wacko’s think that all they need is the right ‘ap’ for their i-phone, and that solves the energy problems. Nope. But the far right billionaire fossil fuel greed-monsters are just as awful. So both sides of the pendulum are absurd, Mitt Romney billionaires on the right, greeney windmill wacko’s on the left.
Arthur on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 7:08 am
Although I agree with Bill most of the time, I do no share his vision that total sort of Mad Max collapse is inevitable, at least not for the ‘developed world’. Yes, there is a catastrophe looming of epic scale, dwarfing anything we have seen in the thirties. It is very well possible that industrial society is finished as we know it, I believe that we are alsmost certainly going to see carmageddon (probably already this decade), meaning that the average citizen in the West will have to abandon his car, possible with an intermezzo where the government will force you to take paying passengers with you, enabled by all these location aware smart phones around.
Bill keeps saying that you need fossil fuels to produce renewables. I do not see that, as you can create high temperatures with electricity as well. Alternatively we can produce biofuels to replace oil and use it for a reduced selected set of high value purposes, like producing renewables… but not to enable Joe Sixpack to drive to Walmart.
Economic growth is over for the rest of this century. What is on the program now is battling downturn, decline and even collapse. This is going to be the biggest cold turkey society has ever experienced. But the challenge now is not to sink away in gloom and doom and see what we can save from our current repository of knowledge and production methods into the future. And the biggest invention that can be saved into the future is this medium, that has the potential to replace moving around of people with sending data over a wire against near zero energy cost. In the future everybody is going to stay where he is or walk/cycle to a local production facility. The ‘heavy’ fossil fuel society of 1820-2020 is going to be replaced by an ‘ethereal’ data society.
deedl on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 7:16 am
@Norm: Wind power stations are getting bigger because “itty bitty baby windmills” can not produce electricity as cheap as the big ones. Close to the ground the wind is slower and full of turbulences due to friction. The larger your wind power station the more power you get for every invested buck. Thats why in europe villages and farmers form funds with their neighbours to buy together a few large wind power stations instead of many small ones. Thats why they replace the small wind power stations first installed on the sweet spots two decades ago by large ones.
About environmental uglification: centuries ago the dutch build wind driven pumps to pump the water off their lowlands that lay beneath sealevel. That was uglification on a colossal scale. Today Millions of tourists visit the netherlands to see the historic windmills (which are pumps, not mills). So i guess future generations will travel to see historic wind power stations or have boating tours to the largast offshore windparks in the world. After cutting down tens of millions of squaremiles of forests, planting the same ugly crops from horizon to horizon and covering millions of squaremiles with concrete, tar and litter, the wind power stations are a minor problem in the uglification of our planet.
Arthur on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 7:22 am
Norm, I do not think that concepts of left or right are very helpfull in understanding the energy problem. Most of us enjoy a comfortable life because of the availability of plenty of energy supply. This is going to stop as most of us realize so we need to take counter measures. Arguments like ‘windturbines are ugly’ are made by people who probably do not understand the severity of the energy situation. I love windmills as well as smart grids and I can assure you I am not very lefty, far from it.lol When I drive past a windturbine of 5 MW, I think: ‘look there is an army of 50,000 men doing work I do not have to do’ and gives me a nice warm secure feeling. In the middle ages every village had a church with a tower. This century every village should have a big wind turbine, so that every night, when everybody is watching the 8 o’clock news on his/her tablet of 2 Watt, the weather forecast is going to decide when mom will be able to switch on the washing machine tomorrow or that she has to wash manually (if there will be any washing machines around by that time).
Arthur on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 10:08 am
To answer my own question asked in my post of 6:47 am, it looks like Italy aleady possesses a smart grid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Italy
“The world’s largest smart meter deployment was undertaken by Enel SpA, the dominant utility in Italy with more than 30 million customers. Between 2000 and 2005 Enel deployed smart meters to its entire customer base. These meters are fully electronic and smart, with integrated bi-directional communications, advanced power measurement and management capabilities, an integrated, software-controllable disconnect switch, and an all solid-state design. They communicate over low voltage power line using standards-based power line technology from Echelon Corporation to Echelon data concentrators at which point they communicate via IP to Enel’s enterprise servers. Thus, demonstrating that smart grids do not require wireless devices that generate radiation. The system provides a wide range of advanced features, including the ability to remotely turn power on or off to a customer, read usage information from a meter, detect a service outage, change the maximum amount of electricity that a customer may demand at any time, detect “unauthorized” use of electricity and remotely shut it off, and remotely change the meter’s billing plan from credit to prepay, as well as, from flat-rate to multi-tariff.”
In other words, some here are plain wrong in thinking that a smart grid is a “pipe-dream”.
The technology to implement it, hardware + software, already exists, see wikipedia “Open_smart_grid_protocol” / OSGP. What is lagging behind is politics and in this case idiotic ‘privacy’ concerns (like in Holland).
BillT on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 2:50 pm
Dream on people. Nothing you use today does not have an oil tag. Nothing.
The are no other enerty sources that are going to make ‘renewables’ possible. None. Not wind, solar, nuclear, or any other dream is going to keep the oil engine going. ALL of what we have today is a result of oil. ALL of it. Look at pictures of the pre-oil world. THAT is what we started with and everything since came out of oil wells.
It doesn’t matter if you agree with me or not. I will have the last laugh, wait and see. Bloinders put on at birth are hard to take off. The western world is pounded with propaganda 24/7/365 by multiple media.
Oh, and America is about 4 1/2% of the total 7,000,000,000+ population of the earth, meaning we should only be consuming ~ 4 1/2% of the world’s resources, not the 30+% we are used to (for the math impaired).
BillT on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 2:54 pm
BTW: ALL of you seem to assume that the financial system that makes all of globalization possible is going to last forever. The fact that it is in a coma doesn’t seem to register as affecting your life in any way. What grid? What pipeline? What refinery? What oil field? If the engine of money stops, so do they. The trillions needed to rebuild the world with all of your ideas does not exist. Never will. The West is bankrupt. The East is struggling to not be. The world is on the brink of war and you think that all of these pipe dreams are going to materialize? Really?
Kenz300 on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 3:30 pm
Wind and solar power plants are being constructed all around the world. They are the future. Investments in alternative energy sources now surpass those of fossil fuel.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/12/08/trillionth-dollar-invested-in-clean-energy-tech-surpassing-that-for-fossil-fuel-power/
Arthur on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 5:15 pm
Well, at least Bill has the courage of his convictions and considers modern civilization a basketcase and decided to retreat to no doubt some tropical hide out idyl and is sure he will have the ‘last laugh’ while the rest of us will perish in a massive die-off, silly believing that wind and solar was going to save us.lol
No hard feelings Bill. Nevertheless some remarks:
“Nothing you use today does not have an oil tag.”
So what? Today is today and will be unlike tomorrow. Den mark has now 41% of it’s electricity from wind and no doubt will have 100% by 2020, provided that some other renewable will prove to be cheaper, like (I think) solar will be. I claim that Denmark’s electricity generating capability will be perfectly renewable and sustainable *IN ITSELF*, even without oil, on this basis. But even Heinberg will admit that we will never run out of oil, so we will always have oil to do the most important things first, like maintaining these few thousand Danish windturbines. Electricity (from wind or solar) is the highest form of energy known to us, as it can be easily converted in any other form of energy, where oil can ‘only’ be used to burn and generate heat. In other words, you can always replace oil with electricity from renewables and create new windturbines with it, like Baron von Munchhausen pulling himself form the swamp by his own hair.
About finance… yes the West is nearly broke, but so what? Nobody wants to hear this of course, but there is one big ‘subsidy’ looming around the corner: massive wage decrease in the US and Europe. Why can a Chinese work for 1/10 of what a westerner makes and not us? We don’t want that of course, but what if extinction is the only alternative? Recovery after a financial crash is the norm and so will it be with us.
PrestonSturges on Mon, 8th Oct 2012 9:10 pm
Wow the anti-wind people are getting frantic.
Wind is “enormously expensive in terms of materials, land,” compared to strip mining?
And there is no technology except that fueled by oil? Good thing the Roman didn’t know that.
Michlae Goggin on Thu, 11th Oct 2012 3:58 pm
If you read the Reason Foundation’s report, it actually says that wind energy can provide a large share of our electricity (at least 50%) and that wind’s benefits are roughly as large as expected (9% reductions in pollution when we get 10% of our electricity from wind, 18% reductions at 20% wind, and 54% reductions at 50% wind). That’s even after the report uses a seriously flawed methodology that overstates the challenges of integrating wind onto the grid and understates wind’s benefits. For more, read the explanation here:
http://www.awea.org/blog/index.cfm?customel_dataPageID_1699=18996
Michael Goggin,
American Wind Energy Association