Comments on: Big Wind: How Many Households Served, What Emissions Reduction? (Part 2)

By: Ralph Hartmon

Ralph Hartmon — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:50:47 +0000

Your article is covering a topic that takes time to comprehend so the more articles written about it the better. Yours is good. The real contribution of industrial wind turbines needs to be understood by a lot more people. In short form industrial wind for energy production is not capable of doing much of what is promised other than costing money. What has not been taken into your calculations is the potential of no net gain when wind produced energy is curtailed or another source is curtailed but unable to ramp down and energy is not utilized by users. This happens but most likely more frequently with wind on line. A large pulp mill in our area could not go off line without first notifying grid managers. The mill would then have to run auxiliary machinery, used for ramping down, to give grid managers time to adjust. Bit of a waste, but necessary for grid stability.

By: Stas Peterson

Stas Peterson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:27:30 +0000

At last, people are publishing reality. Wind and Solar published nameplate capacity and bears no reality to actual obtained energy, from them. Which might average as low as 1/10 of nameplate rating.

Wind and Solar POLLUTE, in their own way. They are certainly not pollution free.

No discussion was made of extensive land use, or disappointing, unsatisfactory lifetimes that also lead to excessive consumption of natural resources for wind. In solar’s case there is thermal pollution from such inefficient generation, plus a cumulative global warming effect from altering the planet’s Albedo from 71% to something lower. This creates a warming effect hundreds of times stronger than any GHGs, for every square meter of solar ever built and installed.

By: Stas Peterson

Stas Peterson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:25:09 +0000

At last, people are publishing reality. Wind and Solar published anmeplat ecapicy tbears no reality to obtained energy form them. Which nmight be as low as 1/10 of nameplate rating.

Wind and Solar POLLUTE, in their own way. They are certainly not pollution free.

No discussion was made of extensive land use, or diusapointing, unsatifactory lifetimes that also lead to excessive consumption of narural resouces for wind. In solar’s case there is thermal pollution from such inefficient generation, plus a cumulative global warming effect from altering the planets Albedo from 71% to something lower. This creates a warming effect hundreds of times stronger than any GHGs, for every square meter of solar ever built and installed.

By: Tom Tanton

Tom Tanton — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:42:08 +0000

Jon, the only penalty for GE fibbing is for the market to then depend more on gas turbines–maybe frame machines or maybe aeroderivatives…but guess who makes THOSE?

By: Jon Boone

Jon Boone — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:26:29 +0000

Outstanding finish to this essay, gentlemen. Your reasoning is relentlessly logical. Yes, the real situation is likely to be more complex than you model here, since, among many other variables, you haven’t factored the role of economic dispatch. Nonetheless, you’ve made it remarkably clear that fine-grained analysis is highly likely to be much less favorable to wind. The GE project discussed here for the Pacific NW is about as carbon emissions friendly as wind can get, Imagine what a similar situation would do on the PJM, with so little hydro and with a current generation mix of 56 percent coal and only about 7% natural gas.

The bottom line is that wind volatility cannot be loosed on the grid by itself; it must always have companion–and highly reliable, very flexible–conventional generation. Think of a yin yang symbol, with 75% of it black (fossil fuel, in most cases) and the other 25% white (for the white horse of wind). Around 75% of any wind project’s installed capacity must be supplied from conventional generation, working inefficiently to do so because of the continuously skittering nature of the wind energy. At times, this skittering will be extremely wide and volatile, threatening the grid’s security if there is enough installed wind capacity on the system.

As you demonstrate, there are many more effective ways of achieving the goals of emissions reductions and lessened fossil fuel use than wind technology, which actually subverts its own reason for being.

As for GE and its ilk, there seems to be no penalty for lying in the energy marketplace, and no accountability for making claims that cannot be delivered upon. Your article here should travel widely, in the process exposing the fraudulent rot at its core.