Wind Power Not On Track For 20% by 2030?
February 17th, 2010
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Wind Power: It’s been around since the 1700’s, it’s been used to generate electricity since the late 1800’s and it’s been crammed down our collective throats since the 1970’s. Today the United States alone hosts tens of thousands of wind turbines and we’ve been building them about as fast as we can since the late 1990’s. Feverish building has nearly doubled capacity since 2005 and every day more enormous wind turbines go up. Modern wind turbines are larger across than the wingspan of a 747, they’re taller than a fifteen story building and have components so massive that they push the limits of what can be transported by road and rail.
Billions upon billions of dollars has been spent on wind power, in the US alone, and most of that money has come from Federal subsidies. The rest has come from rate payers and state and local subsidies. With all this building, the construction of wind turbines at a rate faster than any other country, with the huge promises made that it’s “the future” and with copious amounts of national treasure expended in the efforts to promote wind power, one would think that by 2030 it ought to be at least 20% of electricity production, right? I mean, that’s still twenty years away and if we keep up this feverish pitch of building, it’s just got to get to 20, right? right?
Questions should be asked about the National Renewable Energy Laboratory relationship to the American Wind Energy Association’s propaganda machine. The DoE report 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply acknowledges the reports dependency on data supplied by the wind industry.
The U.S. Department of Energy would like to acknowledge the in-depth analysis and extensive research conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the major contributions and manuscript reviews by the American Wind Energy Association and many wind industry organizations that contributed to the production of this report. The costs curves for energy supply options and the WinDS modeling assumptions were developed in cooperation with Black & Veatch.
Black & Veatch cannot be regarded as an objective source on wind. In fact Black & Veatch boasts,
We helped launch the modern wind power industry in 1975 . . .
Questions must be raised about the validity of this DoE’s “20% by 2030″ report. One test of the objectivity of a wind study is how well it deals with the inflation of wind costs. Since 2004 the costs of wind projects have risen more rapidly than the underlying inflation rate. Yet the report chose to assume base line inflation rates in its future cost projections. This can only be described as a major error. The report states:
Black & Veatch analysts (in consultation with AWEA industry experts) developed wind technology cost and performance projections for this report (Black & Veatch, forthcoming 2008). Costs for turbines, towers, foundations, installation, profit, and interconnection fees are included. Capital costs are based on an average installed capital cost of $1,775 per kilowatt (kW) in 2007. After adjusting for inflation and removing the construction financing charge, this reduces to $1,650/kW for 2006.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory maintains a data base on wind costs. The LBNL report for 2008 titled 2008 Wind Technologies Market Report provides a empirical basis for evaluating the accuracy of the 20% wind estimates. The LBNL study states,
Among the sample of projects built in 2008, for example, the capacity-weighted average installed cost rose to $1,915/kW, up $190/kW (11%) from the weighted-average cost of installed projects in 2007 ($1,725/kW), and up $630/kW (49%) from the average cost of projects installed from 2001 through 2004. Project costs are clearly on the rise.
The LBNL report also found that the cost of wind turbines have been rapidly rising:
Since hitting a low point of roughly $700/kW in the 2000-2002 period, turbine prices appear to have increased by approximately $700/kW (100%), on average, through 2008. Between 2007 and 2008, capacity-weighted average turbine prices increased by roughly $90/kW (7%), from $1,270/kW to $1,360/kW.
A second appearant flaw in the “20% by 2030″ report is its estimate of wind capacity. The report states:
Technology development is projected to reduce future capital costs by 10%.Black & Veatch used historical capacity factor data to create a logarithmic best-fit line, which is then applied to each wind power class to project future performance improvements
The report then projects rising wind capacity for dollar spent. But the the LBNL data in the hands of LBNL reporters tells a different story,
I have only one thing to say to this:
Actually, I would like to add some additional observations (that have been made before):
No amount of research and development, study, scientific inquiry, precision engineering, cleaver technology or any such thing is going to significantly change the amount of energy a turbine of a given size can produce. The technology that goes into a wind turbine is already very mature – meaning there’s not a lot more refinement to be done. The bearings are already very low friction, the generators are already very effecient and the blades are already optimal in their shape and pitch.
It’s possible that some tweaks could squeeze out another one or two percent of effeciency, but the big limiting factor is the energy that is present in wind. Air simply does not move very fast (except in a hurricane) and it doesn’t weigh very much either. Therefore a given volume of air does not contain all that much energy. That’s it. You can’t change that, no matter how much technical wizardry gets thrown at it.
The other thing to consider is the cost of a wind turbine. They’re inherently enormous because they have to be in order to capture the energy from such a huge volume of air. Therefore, they must contain a lot of material, and to be light they need to use materials like fiberglass, carbon fiber, resins, aluminum and special construction techniques. Also, since each turbine has its own generator, it must contain high quality copper – and lots of it. There’s only so much you can do to bring down the cost of something that huge. Anything that big is going to cost quite a bit to build and anything with several tons of copper in it is going to be expensive. It’s possible costs could be brought down a little, but there’s a limit to that.
Finally, a kilowatt of wind power can’t be compared to a kilowatt of power from another source. For one thing, while many power plants usually run at 100%, a wind turbine is lucky to hit a capacity factor of 30%. In other words, a three megawatt turbine is actually only good for less than one megawatt. But it gets worse, because unlike any other type of power plant, every single watt of wind turbine power must always be backed up by one watt of hot, spinning reserve. No, a “smart grid” won’t fix this either. A “smart grid” may improve the effeciency of dispatching that reserve and may allow for somewhat better control of power fluctuation, but in the end you still need the capacity to provide for demand.
And that is why, after years of building turbines as fast as we can, they still don’t count for squat – less than half of a percent of the energy sources in the US. It’s also why it will still not count for squat in ten years or twenty.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 18th, 2010 at 6:36 am
What infuriates me are statements like “the wind is free” (then why do they need the massive tax breaks and subsidies) and “this wind farm will supply 35,000 homes,” neglecting to finish the sentence with “for maybe 20 percent of the time, if you are lucky.”
One has to come to the conclusion that these people do not even understand simple arithmetic let alone the current power situation in the industrialized world.
It takes about 800 X 1000MW power plants or the equivalent to run North America on a daily basis. To be conservative, let’s say 700 X 1000MW plants. Power demand is increasing at a little over 2.5 percent per year, but again, to be very conservative, let’s say 2 percent.
This means that we must build at least 14 X 1000MW power plants every year just to keep up. Windmill enthusiasts would of course have us build 7000 X 2MW windmills instead, blissfully ignoring the fact that the 14 X 1000MW coal or natural gas plants would still have to be built to fill the considerable gap left by the non-operating windmills when the wind didn’t blow.
Customers would thus have to pay for two very expensive power plants to cover just one block of power. None of this would reduce the present CO2 load on the environment even if the windmills could run 100 percent of the time. So what do we do then….build 350,000 X 2 MW windmills?
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February 18th, 2010 at 10:46 am
I agree, neither solar or wind will amount to much, they are far too diffuse.
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February 19th, 2010 at 12:10 am
I agree that nuclear is better than wind, but I think some of Dr. Buzzo’s comments about wind are excessively pessimistic, and in fact fail to explain the recent rapid growth in the wind industry. Even the most pessimistic projections from the dept. of Energy forecast wind overtaking hydro as the largest renewable electricity source, in the next decade or so.
The bottom line is that wind works fine (in the US) when it is diluted 3:1 with dispatchable (i.e. fossil fueled) power. That limitation will not impede the growth in the wind industry for several years.
The other serious problem with wind is that unlike coal or nuclear baseload plants which produce really cheap power after their construction loans are paid off, wind power will be expensive forever (due to the 20 year service life limitation).
The decision makers in the utility industry and government understand this, so I believe that it is very unlikely that we will adopt a renewable portfolio standard like the wind industry wants. So I’m not worried.
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February 19th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Nathan Wilson said:
The DOE is not immune to the political climate. As of 2007, the net electricity production in the US was about 6-8% That’s total energy, not baseload capacity. Actually we’ve had some fairly poor years recently, because on good years, hydroelectric accounts for more than 10% of gigawatt hours.
It depends on how you measure it though. That’s production in the US. If you take into account the net import/export on the North American power grid, the hydroelectric power numbers are higher because of the power bought from Canada. Thus depending on how you measure it it’s at worst 6-7% and at best maybe 14%
Wind, however, is so small that most DOE charts don’t even have a category for it. It’s filed under “other renewable” which accounts for at most, about 2.5%.
However, if you look at that category, you’ll find that the number one source of “other renewable” is biomass and refuse to energy – accounting for more than half of it.
Even by nameplate, wind is less than half that of petroleum burners.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/fuelelectric.html
How do you propose that wind power would be able to increase by a factor of 50-100 in the nest 20 years? Considering how much has been spent in the past ten!
Nathan Wilson said:
Well, coal plants need to burn a considerable amount to just keep a constant head of steam up. They don’t save very much in reserve mode. Combined cycle gas is better, but it still is not as good as you might think, especially given that many plants have supply contracts that basically force them to burn gas because of the constant supply being fed – there’s no place to store the excess gas. But even without that, they need to stay at a high idle for immediate dispatch.
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February 20th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Recovered Lunar Orbiter tapes: Would You Like Some Tapes With Those Fries?
(How fire can be domesticated)
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February 20th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
In germany the figures are very interesting, we have I think 12 % renewables already (of which wind is the main component). It certainly works here, even better then prospected even by the green party itself. And maybe it’s done more cleverly – we don’t give direct subsidies or tax priviliges for renewables – we simply guarantee a certain price which must be paid by utilites (who of course increase their prices for customers, by about 1 eurocent per KWh). Utilities must connect the generators to their grid and the guaranteed price is reduced year by year.
Storage/smart grids remain problems with much research and experimentation going on.
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February 21st, 2010 at 1:56 am
Wow, 2007 data (from the eia link provided) is really old considering the rapid growth in the wind industry. According to 2009 year-end data from the AWEA, the US has 35 GW of wind installed. That’s enough to provide about 2% of our electricity. Wind energy surpassed geothermal around 2006, and I think finally passed biomass in 2009.
So no, I don’t expect the wind industry to increase in size by 50 to 100x in 20 years. I expect it to increase in size by 5x. If we continue installing turbines at the 2009 rate (10GW/year), then in 14 years we will pass that mark. More likely, I think the installation rate will increase to 20GW/year, then crash suddenly (with wind supplying about 8-12% of our electricity).
The 10GW of wind we installed last year is the equivalent of about 4 GW of nukes. How long before the nuclear industry can install at that rate? 5-10 years? The wind thing is really not so terrible as a bridge to a nuclear future.
I’m inclined to believe the DOE when that say that even at 20% contribution from wind, the fossil fuel plants do an ok job of cutting fuel use when the wind is blowing. They don’t have to keep the coal plants running, all the projections say we’ll use lots of natural gas combustion turbines (simple cycle) to provide the required rapid ramp-up capability.
Anyway, we won’t be able to continute pushing the fossil fuel consumption down with all that wind on the system unless we add storage. And the cheapest form of storage will most likely be thermal storage at Gen IV nuclear plant (e.g. hot salt). That arrangement is obviously not economically justifiable, but for the moment, people love wind power in spite of the cost.
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February 21st, 2010 at 2:49 am
There is real option for reasonable scale of wind power, its use with conjunction of hydro power.
A) option just use the dams already build, run them 100% and reduce the water level when not windy nor sunny, when windy or sunny stop the plant and let the water build up.
B) option is building pump station and high reservoir just to store energy, this doesn’t need water coming from high it just needs a good high place for reservoir and some place from which to get water and dump water. Efficiency is about 80%
However nuclear is way to go from environmental point of view, since its high density, and low land use compared to other options. Wind and already build hydro may supplant it with solar but main base load should be nuclear.
PS. We need to get to ZERO CO2 emissions eventually, and nuclear seems to be only reasonable way to get there while “green hippie” methods should be researched and implemented if they become reasonable.
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February 21st, 2010 at 1:57 pm
I see the wind apologists are still scanning for any negative posts on the subject to put in a good word for windmills.
The bottom line is that without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.
I North America wind is nothing but a Trojan horse for gas, the very fact that the gas industry is turning itself inside out supporting it is all the indication we need that wind is going to be good for them.
Real, productive people need real, industrial-sized power and that will never come from wind, and since it has to come from nuclear energy, why would we build windfarms at all?
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February 21st, 2010 at 4:51 pm
thomas said:
OKay, there’s some code words here. “guarantee a certain price which must be paid by utilites” – a utility is like any other buisiness. It pays the market price for a product it wants, and if the product is not worth its cost or is of no use then it won’t buy it. If the product is worthwhile and what it needs, it buys it.
if I own a power plant and I can provide reliable baseload electiricity when needed, a power company will buy from me volentarily. If I provide power in random bursts, then it’s all but worthless. Why should they pay the same for something they don’t want? They’ll need to still pay for reserve and if that power is sent to storage, like pumped hydro, much of it is lost. Plus, you’re forcing them to build the infrastructure to support this power source that they don’t want.
Yes, the “smart grid” can help somewhat. It can’t cure the disease, but it can at least lessen (but not eliminate) the symptoms. However, I’d like to ask why we should pay a lot of money for a grid that is full of expensive technology to solve a problem inherent to a piddle-power source to begin with.
Load following and reserve is not that simple, by the way. Constant fluxuations in power cost efficiency. A gas turbine can go from idle to full power fairly quickly, but it uses a lot more gas to spool up. Even worse, in a combined cycle system, long idle periods can result in loss of steam pressure and that means when it suddenly is demanded again, it can’t function at full efficiency until it heats up again.
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February 23rd, 2010 at 12:17 pm
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