Posted on 08/05/2009 2:19:10 PM PDT by neverdem
Texas has repeatedly been lauded as a leader in wind power development. Some of that attention is deserved. In 2008, the state installed nearly 2,700 megawatts of new wind capacity. If Texas were an independent country, it would rank 6th in the world in terms of total wind power production capacity.
The state's Republican governor, Rick Perry, has been among the state's most ardent wind power boosters, declaring a few years ago that "No state is more committed to developing renewable sources of energy." He went on, saying that by "harnessing the energy potential of wind, we can provide Texans a form of energy that is green, clean and easily renewable." The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club has repeatedly trumpeted wind power development saying that it "means more jobs for Texas, less global warming from coal plants and less radioactivity from nuclear plants." The group says (PDF) that wind power in the state "has exceeded all expectations" and has created "an estimated $6 billion investments and 15,000 new jobs" for the state.
Graphic by Seth Myers
In June, shortly before the US House voted on the cap and trade bill, President Obama reminded reporters that Texas has one of the "strongest renewable energy standards in the country....And its wind energy has just taken off and been a huge economic boon to the state."
Alas, the hype exceeds the reality. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the operator of the state's huge electric grid, has considered the "capacity factor" of wind – the ability of the generators to produce power at 100% of their maximum rated output – and placed wind's reliability at less than 9%. In a 2007 report, the grid operator, known as ERCOT, determined that just "8.7% of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period for the next year." It went on to say "Conventional generation must be available to provide the remaining capacity needed to meet forecast load and reserve requirements." Earlier this year, the grid operator re-affirmed its decision to use the 8.7% capacity factor.
Thus, Texas now has about 8,200 megawatts of installed wind power capacity. But ERCOT, in its forecasts for that summer's demand periods, when electricity use is the highest, was estimating that just 708 megawatts of the state's wind power capacity could actually be counted on as reliable. With total summer generation needs of 72,648 megawatts, that means that wind power was providing just 1% of Texas's total reliable generation portfolio. And ERCOT's projections show that wind will remain a nearly insignificant player in terms of reliable capacity through at least 2014, when the grid operator expects(PDF) wind to provide about 1.2% of its needed generation.
The punchline for the wind power business in Texas is that despite all the hype, the reality is that the Lone Star State will continue to rely on the same fuels that it has relied upon for decades: natural gas, coal, and nuclear.
You are not telling the complete picture either. Please indicate the cost of the increased transmission capacity. Please provide an overall cost figure than includes the windmills, extra transmission capacity, complex control systems, and backup capacity. When the complete system cost is included, wind power is very expensive.
THIS is a seldom-understood fact:
that wind power has a "capacity" of ZERO!
That is, the amount of power that wind can be 100% guaranteed to deliver at any given moment is ZERO - nada, zilch.
So conventional power plants still have to be built to develop the needed capacity.
Wind power can never be more than an expensive though picturesque sideshow.
That 9 percent of windmill reliability figure is based on a very specific set of circumstances at a future date and time.
The purpose of the article you posted was not to enlighten us but to illustrate that the predjudices of the auther against wind power are correct, that wind is not reliable. To do that, the author had to go thru some deep and specific mathematical contortions carefully chosen to make wind look bad. You can do that with any energy source.
I can guarantee you that at some point in the next hundred years all power generating equipment will fail sometime,
Does that make them all unreliable?
In fact the real experience figure of wind power up time is much higher than 9 percent, and grid operators are finding wind power to be a good part of an operating mix as they can use the advantages and work around the disadvantages. They of course do the same thing with nuclear and coal and solar.
You can take wind, coal, nuclear, any kind of power and find a weak point somewhere. This is why it is so important to not put all our eggs in one basket.
Remember, if you have a nuclear plant on line, you have to have a second nuclear plant or equivelant coal plants idling along staffed and ready to take over if the nuclear operating plant suffers a catastrophic shutdown. It takes 1/60 of one second for a computer to take a nuclear plant off line in an emergency. Getting an idle nuclear or coal plant on line takes a whole crew and must take several hours.
If you have a wind farm with a hundred windmills, you might need to keep 4 or 5 in reserve for catastrophic emergency backup. getting an idle windmill on line takes one button and a few seconds.
So not everything is so simple after all.
I covered all this is and more in my post, perhaps you didnt read it all.
The single point connection was $3 billion and the three point connection(with Houston being the third point) was $7 billion.
As for the cost of the windmills, those are the cost of the generator and are paid for/amoritized in his selling price.
I'm not sure what you mean by controls except to say that these would be included in the cost attributed to the wind farm operator, the transmission line builders, or the local provider, which, in the case of the two point connection, was Oncor.
BULLSH*T. I already covered this. You don't need 1 for 1 replacement, as all nuke/coal plants won't break at the same time. But you do need 1MW for 1MW nuke/coal plants to back up windmills for those cold, still nights when all the windmills stop because the wind stopped.
Everything Luke says is CORRECT, larry. That is explicit in the reliability figures for wind of 9% during PEAK LOAD.
Coal, Oil, Gas, Nuclear have nearly random breakdown statistics. Correct, when they do break down it involves greater capacity, but when an area of 100 windmills is all windless (often) that is the equivalent.
The only real figures that need to be used for comparison are the 9% versus the 90% or so for other forms of power.
In addition, wind turbines are expensive and take a beating. When they are not subsidized, they tend to wear out before they generate enough electricity to repay their purchase, installation, and maintenance costs.
Solar power is almost as bad. While technology improvements are making it more cost effective, it's still subject to non-continuous generation limitations (max power at solar noon, zero power at night). This limits where and how it is practical to use it.
When the wind stops, they all stop. This happens, at least once, almost every day, at almost every wind farm in the world. A couple of years ago, I spent some time near one of America's most reliable wind farms. Every day, I observed periods of time when none of the turbines were turning. There were patterns to this, but it was far from consistent. I never saw all of the turbines turning, because some were always broken.
Wind turbines also have problems with high winds. They often have to be shut down just when they should be generating the most power. The systems which protect them from high winds often fail, creating very dangerous situations. There is a spectacular video, from Holland, of a major wind turbine experiencing a break failure during high winds. The turbine threw one of its 60 foot long blades about 1/2 mile. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but it had deadly potential.
I would like to see a comparison of system costs with and without wind capacity. Wind power incurs substantial incremental costs for transmission and backup capacity. In addition, wind power has very low reliability especially for peak demand.
If not for massive mandates and subsidies, investors would not touch wind power in most situations. I have no problem with investors building any type of energy production as long as they bear the consequences for poor decisions. Political control of energy production means that politicians can spend taxpayer money on favored energy production without any consequences except perhaps losing elections.
I'm not sure what you mean by system costs.
It would appear to me that operating costs is the driver. Texas converted much elec gen to natural gas a decade ago and now 50-60% is natural gas fired.
The NG shortage in 2001 was the writing on the wall and the post Katrina NG shortage cost Texas rate payers a lot of money.
Comparing wind power to NG fired electricity at $4/MCF is entirely different when it is $12/MCF.
Actual annual capacity factor is more like 30-35 percent irrespective of what a grid operator wants to say.
Define “often fail”. One could also say nukes often fail there’s one that failed in Russia ya know.
That 30-35% factor mostly reflects how much the wind blows (or, doesn't), right? I mean, sure, if you put a meter on the turbine, it might produce 35% of its rated capacity in a given year.
So, it'd be interesting to see how they came up with 8.7%. Forgive my ignorance but, I could only guess it might have something to do with further reducing your figure by accounting for how much of that energy is consumed vs. how much is 'wasted', how easy (or difficult) it is to make use of the energy coming from the turbines when the wind is blowing. I suppose if the rest of your generating capacity comes from gas-fired plants, it's theoretically possible to make the best use of your wind farms. (Again, forgive me if I'm out in left field.)
Of course, some amount of the energy produced by conventional power plants is wasted, too. I wonder what the capacity factor would be for a typical nuke.
The numbers differ by orders of magnitude.
You have just repeated the talking points against wind.
In fact wind power is much better in actual experience than the black picture you post. The viability of wind power is well proven.
larry
And we have massive swings in demand from early morning to late evening and that has to be handled by turning windmills on and off and by ramping power plants up and down. That is a never ending chore, no matter what the power supply.
You want to talk about power interuption, let a large power plant shut down in an emergency. Now that is real excitement.
wind currents are quite predictable and are all planned for.
better to have excess energy than power blackouts, but the bottom line is that wind power has proven by experience to be a very good power to have in the generating mix.
I suggest you invest all that you can in wind power, and you will reap all the benefits you deserve.
As I said before, that 9 percent is a bogus figures carefully selected to reinforce the authors predjudices.
The actual experience of wind farms is coming in way higher than that. The national figure runs from 20 percent to 33 percent at any given point. The more windmill farms a grid operator has in his grid area the more likelyhood that at least some of them will be producing at any one time.
Wind power yields will vary from location to location, some areas are windier than others. Not all coal or nuclear plants are the same size either. Adding more generating capacity is much easier with wind than coal or nuclear.
As I pointed out, windpower is more reliable than coal or nuclear from a catastrophic failure perspective. If one or two windmills fall apart, the system wont even hiccup. An emergency shutdown of a coal or nuclear powerplant is a major and costly event.
I lived near a coal plant that had to shut down in an emergency. They kept it out of the news, but I knew some employees and they told me that they came whisker close to every employee in the plant to being cooked to death in a plant wide blast of 600 degree flue gas. They were down for a month or so.
New technology trumps old and new windmills are much more efficient under all wind conditions than old first generation windmills. The newest windmills are probablhy twice as efficient as older windmills
Windmills are by far faster to bring on line in an emergency to replace a lost coal or nuclear plant or a sudden heat wave moving in.
Bottom line is that wind farms have proven to be a good and valuable part of our energy mix. They have proven to operate at a KWH cost that is very competitive. They are much cheaper to build and maintain than coal or nuclear plants and they do not require large and expensive work forces to operate.
As the newer technologies that have already been developed replace older windmills, the favorable financial figures will rise dramaticaly, probably to double that of the older windmills.
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