Germany, Denmark, and Spain are the most turbine-ridden countries in the world; none have been able to close a single fossil plant.

Also recall that wind power varies as the cube of windspeed, so that a breeze gusting between 24 and 30 mph — a typical and mostly unnoticed variation — would have an entire plant constantly doubling its output, then dropping back. This is simply not commercially viable, even if one were willing to put up with the insane vandalism of our wilderness and countryside and the hideous capital cost per watt actually produced.

Any closing will be good news for those hoping for the death of fossil-fired generators. And terrible news for electricity consumers expecting reliable, affordable, secure electricity. Since consumers must have capacity, there’s not really much of a choice. To get capacity, they’ll simply have to pay a lot more than they would without the wind energy.

However one feels about this, though, high capacity electricity production is a sine qua non. It is not really negotiable. If coal plants close in one region because of the economic distress you mention, which I think highly unlikely, as has been the case in Ontario for years, other coal plants will open in other areas, from which the first area will simply import the coal’s capacity back–at a higher price, of course.

As is the case with “renewables” in California, what will happen is a political conjuring trick, banning new fossil-fired farms in the state while going out of state, or, as is now the case, out of country, and importing electricity produced from, in this case, natural gas–generated in Mexico. And making everyone pay a lot more in the process, with no real reductions in greenhouse gasses.

This takes both a lot of chutzpa and an exquisitely uninformed citizenry.

I personally disagree with the statement that the wind farms won’t cause retirements of coal-fired plants. I think that wind farms will displace coal-fired power plants for large periods of time reducing the revenues of the formerly base-loaded coal plants to the point that some of the coal-fired plants will become uneconomical. To stay viable capacity payments must be increased for the high “capacity value” plants but that is a tough sell politically because it will be construed as a subsidy for coal.

That is until the system reaches the time when the every 20-year immense high pressure system forms that causes a peak energy demand day that cannot be covered by the wind farms and the remaining fossil-plants. Then it will be oops we made a mistake not keeping those coal and oil plants viable, sorry about the blackout.

The are three questions about wind that should perk your interest. One: is it “integratable? The answer is, of course, yes, given that modern grids can integrate virtually anything these days, including a cumquat or a potato, at least at certain levels of penetration. The second question is: at what cost can this integration be achieved? Here the inquiry should include all the variables involved, including financial cost and increased greenhouse gasses , using, say, chronological load dispatch analyses at 15-minute intervals measured over a year’s time–to gauge wind impact on the grid. Specifically, one would look at how much conventional fuel would actually be reduced as a specific function of the wind behavior.

I believe such analyses would show that wind behavior would have little affect on total CO2 emissions and would save only miniscule conventional fuel use. And it would increase costs to the consumer substantially, as it has everywhere wind is abundant.

Not a lot to show for all the bombast of a wind physical plant. In today’s dollars, a 130MW wind plant is projected to cost $400 million, most of it paid via losses to the Federal Treasury. I’ve already indicated the environmental risks.

The third question is, can wind projects close any conventional generating units or prevent any new conventional plants from being built in the face of increasing demand or to augment aging infrastructure? And the easy to demonstrate answer is: no. There are now nearly 100,000 wind machines extant in the world, with no demonstrable impact on improving the quality of our energy supply.

What is happening should only give Rube Goldberg satisfaction–in that, with industrial wind technology, the modern world of energy engineering is even zanier than he imagined.

The environmental costs are interesting, but I’m not sure you have shown that the environmental costs are any greater than using coal as a power source.

How much this will diminish the avian checks on insects and rodents is conjectural. But there will be consequences. Those who are knowledgeable about how much we’ve lost already should be appalled at the prospect of further loses wrought by something as pretentious as wind technology.