Energy Externalities Day 5: Wind Power
It’s now day 5 of the Energy Externality Game and time to move onto the first of the new renewables, namely wind power. Loved by Green groups who see only reduced CO2 emissions, wind farms are hated by many others who see a blot on the landscape. Here at Energy Matters we normally just see high cost noise being added to a grid that needs to be balanced from second to second with some precision. This high cost noise needs to be mitigated and the cost of that mitigation is normally borne by others, not the wind farm operators.
The Externalities of Energy Production Systems (Day 1 Coal)
Energy Externalities Day 2: Gas-fired-CCGT
Energy Externalities Day 3: Biomass-Fired-Electricity
Energy Externalities Day 4: Nuclear Power
I am proposing to use 12 metrics to measure costs and benefits:
- Fatalities / year / unit of energy produced
- Chronic illness years / year / unit of energy produced
- Environmental costs not covered directly by the system operators
- Foot print of energy system per unit of energy produced
- Energy system costs where energy source transfers costs to the transmission system
- Energy system benefits where energy source provides a service to the transmission system
- Environmental benefits derived from energy system operation
- Taxes raised / year / for total energy produced
- Subsidies paid / year / for total energy produced
- Tax free cost of energy
- EroEI
- Resource availability
For the following 12 electricity generating systems
- Coal-fired (Monday 19 March)
- Gas-fired (Tuesday 20 March)
- Biomass-fired
- Diesel
- Nuclear
- Hydro electric
- Wind
- Solar PV
- Solar thermal
- Wave
- Tidal
- barrage
- lagoon
- stream
- Geothermal
I then go on to provide qualitative assessments of each measure for each electricity system. I have then developed a game whereby we assign a score against each measure on a scale of 1 to 10 where.
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