Home » Posts tagged 'wind energy'

Tag Archives: wind energy

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Offshore Wind is an Economic and Environmental Catastrophe

October 12, 2023

Offshore Wind is an Economic and Environmental Catastrophe

California project would be one of the most egregious cases of environmental destruction in human history

When it comes to “renewables” wreaking havoc on the environment, wind turbines have stiff competition. For example, over 500,000 square miles of biofuel plantations have already replaced farms and forests to replace a mere 4 percent of transportation fuel. To source raw materials to build “sustainable” batteries, mining operations are scaling up, with no end in sight, in nations with appalling labor conditions and nonexistent environmental regulations. But the worst offender is the wind industry.

America’s wind power industry somehow manages to attract almost no negative coverage in the press, or litigation from environmentalists, despite causing some of the most obvious and tragic environmental catastrophes so far this century. Last August I wrote about the ongoing slaughter of whales off America’s northeast coast thanks to construction of offshore wind turbines:

“When you detonate massive explosives, repeatedly drive steel piles into the ocean floor with a hydraulic hammer, and blast high decibel sonar mapping signals underwater, you’re going to harm animals that rely on sound to orient themselves in the ocean. To say it is mere coincidence that hundreds of these creatures have washed ashore, dead, all of a sudden, during precisely the same months when the blasting and pounding began, is brazen deception.”

Nonetheless, when the story can’t be buried, deception is the strategy. Not one major environmental organization, government watchdog agency, or media outlet has called for a slowdown in industrial offshore wind projects. Instead, they repeatedly claim these allegations are misinformation. And from that paragon of truth, FactCheck.org, we get this: “No Evidence Offshore Wind Development Killing Whales.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math

April 1, 2023

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math

A wind farm outside of Palm Springs, Calif., on May 26, 2018. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
A wind farm outside of Palm Springs, Calif., on May 26, 2018. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“In particular, the generation of electricity by wind tells a disappointing story. The political enthusiasm and the investor hype are not supported by the evidence, even for offshore wind, which can be deployed out of sight of the infamous My Back Yard,” he wrote. “What does such evidence actually say?”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, wind power generated more than 9 percent of the net total of the country’s energy in 2021 and is the largest source of renewable power in the country. Over 70,000 turbines generate enough power to serve the equivalent of 43 million American homes, the department says.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

When Renewables Are Not Renewable

February 1, 2022

Sure the wind and sun are renewable, but the collectors we build are not

Wind Turbines

Solar

Solar panels must be replaced every 30 to 40 years because solar panels degrade efficiency by about 1% per year. If we covered the entire state of Arizona with solar panels, they would produce enough electricity to power the world at our current level of demand — but they would have to be replaced every 30–40 years.

Wind

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Material and other limits to scaling wind up to 24 GW by 2050

October 23, 2021

Material and other limits to scaling wind up to 24 GW by 2050

Preface. Here are just a few of the many important points made in this excellent paper:

  1. Research showing no constraints on the materials needed to build wind turbines “dismiss potential physical constraints and issues with natural resource supply, and do not consider the growth rates of the individual technologies needed or how the energy systems are to be sustained over longer time frames”
  2. Wind turbines and solar panels depend on scarce minerals (i.e. rare earth)
  3. A fast growth of renewables would add new fossil fuel demand to current demand during a transition period

And ramping up wind turbines given their 25 year lifespan is fraught with difficulties:

“This study investigates the implications of fulfilling these growth patterns by letting wind energy grow exponentially reaching 19 TW by 2030 and 24 TW by 2050. These capacities are then assumed to be sustained to the year 2100. Laxson et al. (2006) describes a sustained manufacturing model, where installed capacity of wind energy grows to reach 1%, 20% and 30% of U.S. electricity demand by 2020 or 2030. After 25 years the capacity installed 25 years earlier are replaced (repowered). The need to replace the capacity after the end of the service life of the wind turbines affects the desired manufacturing capacity of the wind industry. If the installed capacity of wind is to be sustained over a longer time frame, an industry capable of replacing the capacity taken out of use must exist. If the growth trajectory is too slow to reach a manufacturing capacity large enough to replace the old turbines in the future, the actual wind capacity in use can in fact see a drop after the initial goal is reached. On the other hand, if the manufacturing capacity is expanded too fast, the demand for new turbines will drop and leave manufacturing capacity idle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wind and Solar Energy Don’t Work

February 28, 2021

WIND AND SOLAR ENERGY DON’T WORK

Leftists fantasize that before long, we can dispense with all reliable energy sources–coal, natural gas, nuclear, even hydro–and run our society entirely on wind and solar, two forms of energy that have been obsolete for 150 years.

How can this be, since wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind is blowing sufficiently, which is around 40% of the time, and solar only works when the sun is shining and the panels are not covered in ice and snow–in a northern climate, something like 18% of the time? Obviously the Greenies have a problem. Today, their problem is solved by building natural gas plants that carry the load when wind and solar are AWOL–which is to say, a large majority of the time. Of course, the natural gas plants are dispatchable, which means they can produce energy reliably, at will, 24/7. Which raises the obvious question: if we have to build fully-capable natural gas plants to make wind and solar sort-of work, some of the time, what the heck to we need the wind and solar for?

The truthful answer to that question has nothing to do with the laws of physics, and everything to do with the laws of money. But the Left has another answer: batteries! It looks forward to the day when batteries will store the output of wind turbines and solar panels and thereby turn unreliable, intermittent energy into electricity that you can count on to turn on your lights when you flip the switch.

At American Experiment.org, my colleague Isaac Orr demolishes the Green New Deal fantasy. One basic problem is that wind turbines don’t work when the weather gets cold, which can be fatal in the North, especially when we are experiencing a brutal cold snap:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas

February 10, 2021

Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas

Barely a week after Davos luminaries met with world leaders and Silicon Valley oligarchs to plot their latest phase of the Great Reset, the underlying provenance of their entire ‘climate emergency’ thesis is still struggling to correspond with reality.

Their much-celebrated “Zero Carbon” agenda which virtue-signaling leaders like Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are currently advocating for – is proving to be a lot more difficult to achieve in reality than it is on their elaborate UN Agenda 2030 Powerpoint slides, computer modeled projections and Zoom calls.

No one is being hit with this sobering reality more than the Europe’s premier green trailblazer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is currently in the grips of Europe’s record-breaking freeze this winter.

Stop These Things reports…


Germany’s held up as the world’s wind and solar capital. But, at the moment, the ‘green’ stuff can’t be purchased, at any price.

Its millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all. [Note: don’t forget about the constant supply of electricity from the grid that these things chew up heating their internal workings so they don’t freeze up solid!]

So much for the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future – aka the ‘Energiewende’.

Despite being the object of consternation and much vilification over the last 20 years, Germany’s coal-fired plants are now being appreciated for what they are: truly meaningful power generation sources, available on demand, whatever the weather. With a Nationwide blackout a heartbeat away, the German obsession with unreliable wind and solar is like a time bomb set to explode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

54 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

February 4, 2021

54 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html

Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable.  Nor can electricity generate the high heat required in manufacturing for smelting of metals, glass, and other components.  Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the topics covered below in this long post:

  1. Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
  2. SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
  3. SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
  4. Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
  5. Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Germany’s overdose of renewable energy

January 30, 2020

Germany’s overdose of renewable energy
In this 2010 file photo, Germany’s Green Party leaders Cem Oezdemir (R) and Renate Kuenast give a statement against nuclear energy while standing between two inflated nuclear power stations in front of the Chancellery in Berlin. Photo: AFP / Tim Brakemeier/ dpa

Germany’s overdose of renewable energy

Anti-nuclear hysteria is destroying the environment

This is part 2 in a series. Click here to read part 1.

Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources. Over 30 000 wind turbines have been built, with a total installed capacity of nearly 60 GW. Germany now has approximately 1.7 million solar power (photovoltaic) installations, with an installed capacity of 46 GW. This looks very impressive.

Unfortunately, most of the time the actual amount of electricity produced is only a fraction of the installed capacity. Worse, on “bad days” it can fall to nearly zero. In 2016 for example there were 52 nights with essentially no wind blowing in the country. No Sun, no wind. Even taking “better days” into account, the average electricity output of wind and solar energy installations in Germany amounts to only about 17% of the installed capacity.

The obvious lesson is: if you want  a stable, secure electricity supply, then you will need reserve, or backup sources of electricity which can be activated on more or less short notice to fill the gaps between electricity demand and the fluctuating output from wind and solar sources.

The more wind and solar energy a nation decides to generate, the more backup capacity it will require. On “bad days” these backup sources must be able to supply up to 100% of the nation’s electricity demand. On “good days” (or during “good hours”) the backup sources will be used less, or even turned off, so that their capacity utilization will also be poor. Not very good economics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work

October 3, 2019

Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work

The reasons why the Green New Deal won’t really work are fairly subtle. A person really has to look into the details to see what goes wrong. In this post, I try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.

[1] None of the new renewables can easily be relied upon to produce enough energy in winter. 

The world’s energy needs vary, depending on location. In locations near the poles, there will be a significant need for light and heat during the winter months. Energy needs will be relatively more equal throughout the year near the equator.

Solar energy is particularly a problem in winter. In northern latitudes, if utilities want to use solar energy to provide electricity in winter, they will likely need to build several times the amount of solar generation capacity required for summer to have enough electricity available for winter.

Figure 1. US daily average solar production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.

Hydroelectric tends to be a spring-dominated resource. Its quantity tends to vary significantly from year to year, making it difficult to count on.

Figure 2. US daily average hydroelectric production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.

Another issue with hydroelectric is the fact that most suitable locations have already been developed. Even if additional hydroelectric might help with winter energy needs, adding more hydroelectric is often not an option.

Wind energy (Figure 3) comes closest to being suitable for matching the winter consumption needs of the economy. In at least some parts of the world, wind energy seems to continue at a reasonable level during winter.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What If There Isn’t Enough Energy Going Forward?

August 25, 2018

Nuttapong/Shutterstock

What If There Isn’t Enough Energy Going Forward?

We’ll be forced to live with less. Maybe a LOT less.

Currently the media is breathlessly cheering the record amounts of US oil production. Stories like this one get top billing on major news websites:

Texas Gulf Coast exports more oil than it imports for the first time (CNN)

It’s a big achievement that highlights a surge in US oil exports, and that shows how the shale boom can make America less reliant on foreign oil.

“It’s a definite milestone. Nobody saw this coming 10 years ago,” said Bob McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group and a former energy official under President George W. Bush. “It’s an unambiguously good thing. It diversifies our dependence from the volatile Middle East.”

Texas is the epicenter of the shale revolution, with soaring production in the oil-rich Permian Basin leading the United States to record output. Rapid technological advances in fracking, the process of unlocking oil and gas deep underground, have dramatically reduced the cost to drill oil in the Permian Basin.

Texas is now on track to produce more oil than either Iran or Iraq. That would make Texas No. 3 in the world if it were a country.

Sounds pretty wonderful, right? Technology advances in the fracking process have enabled the “shale miracle”, resulting in the US producing over 10 million barrels per day for the first time since the 1970s. Think of all the incremental GDP growth that excess oil will power!

If these trends continue, CNN goes on to tell us, the US will become an net energy exporter soon:

US on track to become net energy exporter

The United States still relies on foreign oil — but not as much.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A review of recent solar & wind auction prices

May 8, 2018

A review of recent solar & wind auction prices

Recent renewable energy auctions in a number of countries have been won by record low solar and wind bids – proof, according to some media sources, that wind and solar are already cheaper than fossil fuels. This post addresses the question of whether these low bids are realistic and concludes that they probably aren’t. But a detailed assessment of why they aren’t – and why wind and solar auction bids vary so much from country to country – is beyond the scope of a single blog post. Correspondents who can supply country-specific details on these questions are encouraged to provide them.

In recent years auctions have become the vehicle of choice for governments seeking to expand their renewable energy sectors. Instead of setting up generous subsidy schemes and leaving development up to the market, auctions allow governments to specify how much new renewable capacity they want, when they want it by, and in some cases even the time of day over which the power is to be delivered. Auctions, in short, allow governments to plan their transition to renewables in accordance with the targets they have set – always assuming, of course, that they are capable of developing plans that keep the lights on.

The auctions are also often described as being “capacity-neutral”, meaning that bidders can bid coal- or gas- fired power if they want to. As a practical matter, however, wind and/or solar almost always win because of their zero fuel cost and because the costs of matching the intermittent generation from these sources to demand are ignored.

We begin with some historical perspective. Figure 1 shows average wind and solar bid prices between 2010 and 2016, before the most recent round of auctions (data from the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA):

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stunning drops in solar, wind costs mean economic case for coal, gas is ‘crumbling’

April 2, 2018

Stunning drops in solar, wind costs mean economic case for coal, gas is ‘crumbling’

Things are only going to get tougher for gas and coal compared to renewables.

Solar power prices are dropping at record rates. CREDIT: Acera.
SOLAR POWER PRICES ARE DROPPING AT RECORD RATES. CREDIT: ACERA.

Prices for solar, wind, and battery storage are dropping so rapidly that renewables are increasingly squeezing out all forms of fossil fuel power, including natural gas.

The cost of new solar plants dropped 20 percent over the past 12 months, while onshore wind prices dropped 12 percent, according to the latest Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report. Since 2010, the prices for lithium-ion batteries — crucial to energy storage — have plummeted a stunning 79 percent (see chart).

Lithium-ion battery prices have plummeted since 2010 and are projected to keep dropping.
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY PRICES HAVE PLUMMETED SINCE 2010 AND ARE PROJECTED TO KEEP DROPPING.

“The economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling,” as BNEF’s chief of energy economics, Elena Giannakopoulou, told Bloomberg.

At the same time, solar and wind plants — which are increasingly being built with battery storage — are eating into the utilization of existing coal and gas plants, making them far less profitable. For instance, the super-efficient combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plants that have been popular in recent decades, were designed to be used at full power between 60 percent and 90 percent of the time.

But their actual utilization rate (also called the “capacity factor”) has been plummeting in recent years, and is now close to a mere 20 percent in countries as diverse as China, Germany, and India (see chart).

Solar and wind are squeezing out coal and gas worldwide.
SOLAR AND WIND ARE SQUEEZING OUT COAL AND GAS WORLDWIDE.

Arizona regulators “recently refused to endorse plans by three power companies that included more natural-gas facilities,” the New York Times reportedWednesday. “Commissioners directed them to make greater use of energy storage and plants that produce zero emissions.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Inconvenient energy fact of the day

February 22, 2018

Inconvenient energy fact of the day

In 2016, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of the total world’s energy (Total Primary Energy Demand (TPED)), even after trillions of dollars in taxpayer-extracted subsidies, and will reach only a 3.6% share of energy in 2040, according to the International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2017 forecast (see graphic above). The world’s energy future of tomorrow, even almost a quarter century from now in 2040, will look very much like it does today, with fossil fuels supplying the large majority of our energy (81% today vs. 75% in 2040) and solar and wind playing a relatively minor role as energy sources.

Sources: Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley (“Shale is the Real Energy Revolution”).

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar

November 22, 2017

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar

In his recent post on the Helm Review Euan Mearns predicted that Helm’s recommendation that “intermittent producers need to bear the cost of converting intermittent to firm capacity” will, if adopted, “sound the death knell for new wind and solar projects in the UK”. This post presents ball-park estimates of the economic impacts of Helm’s recommendation for two cases – wind-plus-storage and wind-plus-CCGT. The wind-plus-storage case is uneconomic at any reasonable carbon price and the wind-plus CCGT case is at best marginally competitive with alternative generation sources. These results suggest that Euan’s prediction is probably correct for wind and probably for solar too, although I did not review any solar cases.

First a brief disclaimer on Helm’s “firm capacity” recommendation. It can be interpreted to mean that intermittent producers would have to convert their output into 100% dispatchable form before it can be sent to the grid, and for the purposes of analytical simplicity I have assumed here that this interpretation is the correct one. However, Helm’s recommendation refers not to “firm capacity” but to “equivalent firm capacity”, which according to Helm:

…. focuses on the de-rated capacity value to the system of the different forms of generation. As the cost of addressing intermittency falls with DSR and storage, so the de-rating factors lessen.

In three pages of explanation (beginning on page 192 of his review) Helm fails to make it clear how these de-rated capacity factors are to be calculated, and because I don’t know how to calculate them either I have ignored the potential impacts of a de-rating approach.

Estimating wind generation

Rather than attempt a market-wide study I structured this review around a hypothetical 1GW offshore wind farm in the North Sea, the annual generation from which I assumed would be proportional to the generation achieved by Danish offshore wind farms in 2016 (hourly data from P-F Bach). I then performed the following operations:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK offshore wind capacity factors – a semi-statistical analysis

October 7, 2017

UK offshore wind capacity factors – a semi-statistical analysis

The average capacity factor at 28 operating UK offshore wind farms is 33.6% (most recent 12-month average) and 34.5% (lifetime), increasing to 36.1% and 37.5% when four demonstration projects are discarded. There is a dependence of capacity factor on age, with older farms showing capacity factors of around 30% and younger ones factors of around 40%. This is interpreted to be a result of  increased turbine sizes, with taller modern turbines accessing higher wind speeds at higher elevations. There is no evidence for significant degradation of turbine performance with time. A “generic” UK offshore wind farm coming on line in 2017 can be assumed to have a capacity factor of around 41%, although projections indicate that the turbines planned for the Hornsea II farm discussed in previous posts could have capacity factors exceeding 60%.

The data used in this post are from Energy Numbers. I have no way of verifying these data but have assumed them to be correct.

Two recent posts that attracted considerable interest, one by Euan Mearns and one by me, addressed the subject of UK offshore wind strike prices, and since strike prices are directly related to capacity factor I thought this would be an appropriate time to look into the question of what UK offshore wind farm capacity factors have been, what they are now, what we might expect them to be in the future, and in particular what are the factors that govern what the capacity factor is likely to be.

The locations of the 24 offshore wind farms used in the analysis are shown by the red boxes in Figure 1 (the four demonstration projects listed by Energy Numbers bias capacity factors low and are excluded). Ten are on the west coast of the UK and fourteen on the east. Most are close inshore. The map and the accompanying explanation are from this July 2015 UK government publication.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Post navigation

← Older posts

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress