Posted on 05/12/2017 12:19:49 PM PDT by all the best
Wind generation accounted for nearly 23 percent of power generation for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in the first quarter of 2017.
The winter is the windiest time of year in Texas. It is also a season when power demand wanes and many plants shut down for maintenance.
But for 2016, wind produced more than 15% of electic power in Ercot.
Additionally, average wholesale prices reached a record low in Texas despite record demand.
Good point.
Posted on a similar thread:
A company tried to put in a wind farm in my country town once, wanting to rent space across numerous properties.
I realized that the driving business model was a series of ownerships:
- Sales pitch, acquiring the property rights (”we’d like to rent a mere X square feet of your property to put up this tower”)
- Flip that to the construction company (builds the tower)
- Flip that to the operator company (manages power generation/distribution)
...then things get interesting...
- Considering the enormous cost of repairs, broken turbines may or may not get fixed. (Go look up “spectacular wind turbine failures”)
- As turbines reach end-of-life, what happens gets murky, most likely...
- Flip that to scrapping operation, costly process of dismantling & removing the very large & tall turbine remains.
Upshot is it’s a series of “flipping”, with each stage’s owner not caring about next/previous stages, only that they can somehow get a profit out of their flip. That could very well end with a business buying the end-of-life equipment, scrapping & selling what they easily can, then declaring a loss on the rest & bankrupting out of further liabilities.
What this looks like:
- A confusing sales pitch to the locals (what I encountered) who don’t understand what the marketing crew cleverly portray
- Locals consenting to renting out property (big profit for leasing a very small space)
- Eyesores constructed (from a distance they may look interesting, but up close the fast-moving shadows and “infrasound” are very irritating) and lasting 10-20 years
- Major mechanical failures ending usefulness, at best turbine stop spinning, at worst turbine suffers fire & partial collapse
- Game of musical chairs stops, whoever is left standing is stuck with hulking debris which is costly to remove
- Giant eyesores remain indefinitely while nobody wants to pay for removal.
The aforementioned town passed an anti-windmill ordinance and they weren’t built. I’d have had a spectacular view of them all if built.
I watched some show last week about things that burst into flames in the sky. The host wondered what they were and he and his camera crew photographed them. They were birds who flew into the concentrated solar light of a solar power plant. The video showed the birds burned and in one case writhing on the ground for a half minute or so before expiring.
This is a terribly cruel way for an animal to die.
bkmk
Yep, pretty much, except you neglected to mention the absolutely blighted landscape.
Check out the documentary “Windfall”.
Here is an excerpt from a review by NPR:
“To optimize the investment, wind-power developers tend to build a lot more turbines than they initially propose. In Tug Hill, farther north in upstate New York, a proposed 50 high-tech windmills became 195. As skeptics began to investigate, they learned that wind power is too unreliable to replace dirtier forms of generation, and that the wind business is based less on electricity than on tax credits: Big investment companies keep flipping the companies so as to restart the depreciation process.”
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146099048/when-a-windfall-isnt-quite-what-it-seems
My son got his Chem E from Purdue, which is just south of the White County turbine farm. He says most of the Engineering profs referred to it as the “Battery farm.” To an Engineer, for most of their useful lives the wind turbine farms are batteries, slowly releasing back into the grid the tremendous amount of energy it took to build them.
My understanding from a cousin who lives in that area (Jasper County) is that Indianans hate the wind turbines because what little energy they produce is used in Chicago, not Indiana.
There is nothing at all “hard to follow.”
But I posess an educational which was standard when I was young. The death of said millions of birds does not lower the overall population of birds.
At all. In any way.
Therefore: non sequitur.
You see, the reproduction rate for birds always outstrips the food supply. The limiting factor for the birds is the food supply, not windmill blades or smacking into the towers. If you ever lived outside in the woods for any length of time you would know that birds often smack into trees and die, but that doesn’t get as much handwringing as when it is a turbine they smack into.
At the end of the day, every bird that goes out in a pure of feathers doesn’t eat the same food that now sustains a different bird which would have died for lack of that same food.
Important survival traits shift, but the population isn’t reduced.
You didn’t learn this in fifth grade? When we’re you born?
They are made of metal. Somebody will cut them up and sell them for scrap.
Texas spent billions of tax dollars on constructing power lines- moving that cost from electric bills to tax bills.
It also has the sneaky renewable mandate which hides the wind subsidy.
There’s so much wind power now that their Senate voted to drop the RPS but the ‘renewables’ donors blocked it.
And, of course, taxpayers in other states contributed via the federal tax benefits.
Whichever side you’re on, it’s been made impossible for the costs to be fairly examined.
Cut the government subsidies on wind and solar, and they’ll eventually go away.
The article is about whether or not wind farms are economically viable. Do they make sense?
Conversing about the fauna surrounding the windmills is a non sequitur. The aesthetics of the towers would be another by the way.
You took umbrage with me pointing that out (despite the fact that wind farms do not reduce the overall population of aforementioned fowl) even though the topic of the article is the power generation efficiency of windmills.
Or are you and batterycommander advancing the belief that dead birds impact the Killowatt hours produced in some way?
Laz, are you interested in this issue? I’m pinging you just in case.
So many billions flushed away over stuff most of us said would never work. What a shocker.
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