Posted on 11/26/2008 1:56:07 PM PST by yankeedame
This is not what President-elect Barack Obama's energy and climate strategists would want to hear. It would be anathema to Al Gore and other assorted luminaries touting renewable energy sources which in one giant swoop will save the world from the “tyranny” of fossil fuels and mitigate global warming. And as if these were not big enough issues, oilman T. Boone Pickens’ grandiose plan for wind farms from Texas to Canada is supposed to bring about a replacement for the natural gas now used for power generation. That move will then lead to energy independence from foreign oil.
Too good to be true? Yes, and in fact it is a lot worse.
Wind has been the cornerstone of almost all environmentalist and social engineering proclamations for more than three decades...
But Europe, getting a head start, has had to cope with the reality borne by experience and it is a pretty ugly picture.
Independent reports have consistently revealed an industry plagued by high construction and maintenance costs, highly volatile reliability and a voracious appetite for taxpayer subsidies....
...this summer, the U.K., under pressure to meet an ambitious E.U. climate target...assumed the mantle of world leader in wind power production....Thus the U.K.'s wind operation provides the ideal case study -- and one that provides the most complete conclusions.
The U.K. has all the natural advantages.
In short, if wind power is less than successful in the U.K., its success is not guaranteed anywhere.
But wind infrastructure has come at a steep price...consumers were forced to pay a total of over $1 billion to the owners of wind turbines. That figure is due to rise to over $6 billion a year by 2020 given the government's unprecedented plan to build a nationwide infrastructure with some 25 gigawatts of wind capacity...
Ofgem, which regulates the U.K.'s electricity and gas markets, has already expressed its concern... they claim, is “grossly distorting the market while hiding the real cost of wind power.
In the past year alone, prices for electricity and natural gas in the U.K. have risen twice as fast as the European Union average... Ofgem believes wind subsidy has been a prime factor...
In May 2008, a report from Cambridge Energy Research Associates warned that an over-reliance on offshore wind farms...would further create supply problems and drive up investor costs....But worse news was to come.
In June, the most in-depth independent assessment yet of Britain's...wind turbine industry was published. In the journal Energy Policy...came up with a series of damning conclusions:
not only is wind power far more expensive and unreliable than previously thought, it cannot avoid using high levels of natural gas...
[The] report highlights the key issue of load factor, the actual power generated compared to the theoretical maximum...the average load factor for wind turbines across the U.K. was 27.4 percent.
Thus a typical 2 megawatt turbine actually produced only 0.54 MW of power on an average day. The worst performing U.K. turbine had a load factor of just 7% percent....a poor return on investment. But this poor return is often obscured by the subsidy system that allows turbine operators and supporters to claim they can make a profit...
Variability is one of the chief criticisms levelled at wind power. When the wind drops or blows too hard, turbines stop spinning and you get no power. ...advocates have claimed that this can be avoided...by creating an international “supergrid.” But, as [the] report makes clear, calm conditions not only prevail on a fairly regular basis, they often extend across the country with the same conditions being experienced as far away as France and Germany. Worse still...long periods of calm over recent decades occurred in the dead of winter when electricity demand is highest.
Periods of low wind means a need for pumped storage and essential back-up facilities.... a realistically feasible U.K. pumped-storage base would only cope with one or two days of low winds at best. As regards back-up facilities...the only feasible systems for the planned 25 gigawatt wind system would be one that relied equally on old-style natural gas turbines....the expense of a threefold wind, pump storage and gas turbine back-up solution "would be ridiculous."
The problems don’t end there.
The British report highlights what more and more wind farms would mean when it came to installing gas turbine back-ups....
But cheap gas turbines are far less efficient than big, properly sized base-load turbines...Cheaper, less resilient plants will mean high maintenance costs and spare back-up gas turbines to replace broken ones that would suffer regular thermal stress cracking. And of course, the increasing use of gas for the turbines would have a detrimental effect on reducing carbon dioxide emission – always one of the chief factors behind the wind revolution.
Oswald's report concludes also that the all this wear and tear will further stress the gas pipeline network and gas storage system.... Critically, most of the issues raised in the independent report have not been factored into the cost of wind calculations. With typical British understatement, Oswald concludes that claims for wind power are "unduly optimistic."
We think they've been blown away
W’re safe, we have ethanol.
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