The steady winds of New Zealand have allowed the country’s wind turbines to have the highest capacity factors for the wind in the world (around 37–40 percent). However, wind still has a cost premium to alternatives and is intermittent. In addition, output is about 10 percent below average in the autumn and early winter when it is most needed in New Zealand. The country’s abundant hydro resources (and pumped storage) cannot rescue wind from its intermittency and seasonality problems.
Prospectively, greater reliance on wind from government edicts is throwing good money after bad. Non-intermittent sources are far cheaper, not just reliable. A let-the-market-decide policy is needed in New Zealand as for the rest of the world.
Background
The enthusiasm for renewable energy in the form of windpower, marine power, and the like, is driven by a belief that man-made greenhouse gases will cause dangerous global warming and that large-scale adoption of these technologies will “fight climate change.”…
Chip Knappenberger was perhaps the first analyst to demonstrate the negligible impact on global temperatures that would result from unilateral U.S. adoption of the pending Waxman-Markey bill. Knappenberger showed that even if the U.S. cut its emissions by 83% (of the 2005 level) by the year 2050, and then capped them at that level indefinitely, the schedule of global temperature increases would only be postponed by about five years.
Naturally, supporters of strong government action argued that the whole point of Waxman-Markey was to give American negotiators credibility when they demanded reciprocal action from other countries; Paul Krugman says as much in a recent blog post. Yet this leads to the next major problem: If the whole world adopted the stringent emission cutbacks in Waxman-Markey, then the costs to the global economy would far outweigh any reasonable estimate of the benefits (measured in avoided climate damage).…
Many analysts (including myself) have written about the innumerable problems with cap-and-trade, mostly focusing on the bogus nature of the trade. And most of the problems we’ve predicted have found their way into the current cap-and-trade law working its way through Congress, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Waxman-Markey climate bill).
As was widely predicted, Waxman-Markey has degenerated into little more than a special-interest pork-fest, where the political system is getting ready to give away at least 85% of the valuable emission permits to favored energy constituencies such as electrical utilities, university researchers, low-income households, renewable manufacturers, anti-deforestation programs, and so on. The Obama administration’s pledge to auction off 100% of the emission permits was a joke on the face of it: virtually all emission trading programs feature extensive “grandfathering” of polluters and favored constituencies.…