Category — Wind (also see Windpower: History and Issues)

January 7, 1997, some 13 years ago, was one of the worst days in my 16-year career at Enron. Enron had already entered into the solar business (1994) in partnership with Amoco (Solarex), and the U.S. wind industry was on its back. Zond Corporation was struggling, and  rival Kenetech had recently suspended its dividend and was on the way to  bankruptcy. Enron bought Zond on this day and renamed it Enron Wind Company.

Enron Wind would never turn a profit, and it would be sold in May 2002 by the bankrupt parent to GE. (GE and Enron would have other ominous parallels.)

Enron came in at just the right time for a troubled, undeserving industry by

1. Putting a big-name corporation in the U.S. wind industry for the first time;
2. Issuing countless press releases on ‘wonderful’ green wind for the next several years; and
3. Successfully lobbying Texas politicians to enact the most strict renewable mandate in the country in 1999.

Regarding the third point, the Texas mandate created an unholy business-government alliance of sufficient size for the state to increase its renewable mandate in 2005. Texas is the leading wind power state in the country–but hardly by consumer choice.

Right after Enron purchased Zond to enter into the wind business, I got a call from Hap Boyd, Enron Wind’s PR person. The Cato Institute had just published my windpower-cenric study, Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’ (August 1997), and Hap was trying to sell me on the benefits of wind. One of his arguments I remember was that landowners were receiving royalties from allowing the use of their land for wind turbines, as if this really meant something.

My relationship with Enron Wind went downhill from there. The head of the subsidiary wanted to get me fired for my public opposition against this technology (see the interoffice memos posted at my political Capitalism website).

Oh how sad I am that Enron purchased Zond and did so much to enable the artificial windpower boom in Texas and United States. Houston Chronicle business editorialist Loren Steffy wrote about this in a column, Wind Whispers of Enron (June 3, 2008). [Read more →]

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Yogi Berra. The baseball Hall of Famer could easily have been predicting the coming resurgence of new natural gas–fired power plants. A couple of nuclear plants may actually break ground, but don’t hold your breath. Many more wind turbines will dot the landscape as renewable portfolio standards dictate resource planning, but their peak generation contribution will continue be small (and disappointing).

The most interesting story for 2010 is that the dash for gas in the U.S. has begun–again. In Part II or this two-part report, we will explore the challenges facing nuclear, coal, and renewable energy electricity sources in 2010 and beyond.

Business Climate–Energy Demand

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century and a second year of avoiding an economic collapse, the U.S. business climate seems to have become more positive. A growing sense of cautious optimism is appearing. A mid-October survey by the National Association for Business Economics concluded that the largest recession since the 1930s Great Depression is over, and economic growth is likely for the U.S. economy in 2010. The government announced that third-quarter 2009 economic growth hit 3.5%, the first positive growth in five quarters, suggesting an end to the recession (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Electricity growth resumes in 2010. After a two-year contracting market, total electricity consumption in the U.S. in 2010 is expected to increase. Source: EIA, November 2009 Short-Term Energy Outlook

The implications for electric generation are mixed. What gets built depends on a complex stew of credit markets, regulatory responses, economic growth, technology, and national politics. Some of those are leading economic indicators, some lagging, some not clear at all.

Renewable generation has not made a convincing economic case in the market. But politically it has the upper hand. Coal and nuclear continue to take a political battering at the hands of the renewables advocates. The politics of energy is being upended by new implications for natural gas. The political and regulatory landscape is a dog’s dinner (a Britishism for an undigested mess).

The need for new generation to supply load appears less urgent than in previous years. According to the EIA, demand for electricity has fallen since the economy tanked in 2008. The demand down-tick is the first since the EIA has accumulated these statistics in 1977.

Facing a sluggish economy, consumers have reduced thermostats, cut off air conditioning, and dialed down appliances, leading to the decline in electricity demand. A cool 2009 summer in most of the U.S. helped to reduce air conditioning load. Net electric generation dropped 6.8% from June 2008 to June 2009. That was the 11th consecutive month that electric generation slid downward, compared to the same month in the prior year.

Analysts say they expect the declining demand trend to reverse when economic growth shows up at the beginning of 2010 or thereabouts. But they have been wrong before and may be wrong again. The EIA, the U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical agency, says it suspects the decline in demand will continue into early 2010, despite what appears to be a bottoming-out of the recession.

Many electric power company long-term capital spending plans have been built on the dire forecasts of the past decade, particularly from NERC. For years, the conventional wisdom in the generating industry was that the U.S. was running out of generating capacity. Year after year NERC had the same message: It’s time to build baseload, particularly nuclear and coal, and make major investments in high-voltage transmission.

Maybe not. Intermediate-load and peaking units, suggesting new gas plants, may be the ways to hedge big investment bets on future baseload units. A recent Washington Post article quoted anonymous sources as saying that new nuclear plants aren’t economical until natural gas prices are above $7/mmBtu. That’s more than double the current price. [Read more →]

“The winds, turning more mills than ever before, pump water, grind grain, churn, and do a score of little tasks for a surviving domestic industry; but they list not to blow with enough regularity or violence to keep wheels spinning and mills going.”

- Walton Hamilton and Helen Wright, The Case of Bituminous Coal (New York: Institute of Economics/Macmillan, 1926), p. 3.

William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question (1865), the book that founded mineral economics, got it right on the limits of renewables for the machine age and the godsend of coal as a superabundant utilitarian energy source.

Previous posts at MasterResource have summarized Jevons’s 19th century wisdom on the primacy of coal (carbon-based energy); the limits of windpower; the limits of hydropower, biomass, and geothermal; and the paradox of energy efficiency.

Obama energy policy–and all of his smartest-guys-in-the-room energy advisors–would benefit from the insights contained in this 144-year-old book.

But Jevons was too pessimistic on the future of coal and petroleum, as detailed in chapter 7 of my book Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy. And Jevons scarcely knew about the other foundational fuel of the carbon-based energy age: natural gas.

The Case of Bituminous Coal (Hamilton and Wright)

The 1926 book published by the Institute of Economics by Macmillan, The Case of Bituminous Coal, by Walton Hamilton and Helen Wright, offers an interesting update of the Jevons worldview of energy. Like Jevons, they got it right on the limitations of renewables and primacy of fossil fuels, but they got it wrong on a coming depletion of oil and gas in particular.

For the record, here is an excerpt from pages 2–5 of the book: [Read more →]

Best of MasterResource: 2009
This post orginally appeared (with comments)
on March 4th

The disadvantage of windpower as a primary energy source has been long recognized. This 1838 textbook described the competitive situation of wind as follows:

 William Stanley Jevons also detailed the problems of windpower in his 1865 classic, The Coal Question, [Read more →]

Editor Note: Author John Etherington, formerly a Reader in Ecology at the University of Wales, has extensively researched the implications of intermittently available renewable electricity generation, particularly wind power. He is a Thomas Huxley Medallist at the Royal College of Science and a former co-editor of the International Journal of Ecology.

 

 It may be a bit too late to order copies of the just published 198-page The Wind Farm Scam (Stacy International, 2009) by British ecologist John Etherington as a holiday gift, but it’s well worth getting (and giving) copies of the book as soon as you can secure them.

The book should be required reading for every high school, college, and university student — especially in those institutions offering energy and environmental programs.

Although the book written about the UK experience, most of its facts about “wind farms” are applicable worldwide.  It explains wind energy—and its limitations and environmental insults—in easily understood terms  It explains why wind will never provide a significant, reliable source of electricity.

As in the US, “wind farms” in the UK are being built primarily because of government fiat and huge government-forced subsidies, not because of their true environmental, economic, or energy benefits.  Apparently, the tax breaks and subsidies in the US are even more attractive than those in the UK since two major oil companies, BP and Shell, have pulled out of UK “renewable” energy programs with the intent of focusing their attention (and renewable rent seeking) on the US and Canada.

Personally, I found Dr. Etherington’s well-researched and clear-headed discussion of wind energy a very welcome relief from the wind energy madness now underway in the US.

For example: [Read more →]

Three previous posts have examined the emissions problem related to intermittent industrial windpower that is firmed up with fossil-fuel generation.

1. Part I presented a framework of the necessary considerations and an interim assessment of the effects on fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions until sufficiently comprehensive studies can be performed in the areas indicated. This analysis shows approximately the same gas burn and an increase in related emissions, including CO2, compared to the no-wind case.
2. Part II reviewed the simplistic, incomplete approach that is usually claimed by wind proponents and policy makers. Introducing necessary considerations shows the dramatic, negative impacts presented in Part I.
3. Part III critically reviewed an article by Milligan et al, introduced in a post on Knowledge Problem in response to Part I. The Milligan article claims negligible reductions from the theoretical maximum and contains questionable material.

This post deals with issues raised in comments and other feedback received to date. Further comments and debate on new issues will continue this series.

Reciprocating Engine Gas Plants as Wind Shadowing/Back-up

It has been suggested by Donald Hertzmark and Robert Peltier of MasterResource that reciprocating engine gas plants as wind shadowing/back-up be recognized as a partial solution to the wind emissions problem. It is also mentioned by Milligan et al.

Specifically, Midwest Energy (MWE) in Kansas has implemented a natural gas-fired plant consisting of nine 8.4 MW reciprocating gas engines to help support MWE’s 325 MW total system demand and back-up power supply in the event of a transmission outage. The MWE system will also be accommodating 49 MW of industrial wind power by the end of 2009, representing 16 per cent of the peak load in capacity terms.

An additional advantage of the small multi-engine configuration is its ability to provide back-up power for the wind component. The reciprocating engines are fast-starting and represent a spinning reserve capability, which suits them for this task, especially as individual engines can be added or removed from production as needed, as opposed to the ramping up and down of a larger unit, such as a gas turbine. It is important to note that the capacity ranges for gas turbine plants start at the top end of those for the reciprocating engine plants. The question is: is this a better solution than gas turbine plants for wind shadowing/back-up?

In addressing this, some considerations are: [Read more →]

Posts at Knowledge Problem acknowledge the range of results from Part I and Part II in my series; Katzenstein and Apt; and an article by Michael Milligan et al, Wind Power Myths Debunked, but attribute much of the differences to characteristics of the power system to which wind power is added.

However, although results will vary by jurisdiction, the differences I reported are not derived from this consideration but from general issues with respect to wind power integration. Milligan claims low reductions from the theoretical maximum (negligible to 7 per cent), apparently from Gross et al’s literature review, but this does not survive critical assessment.

The work of Katzenstein and Apt is cited in the bibliography to Part I, even though they show that as much as 75–80 per cent of the CO2 emissions reductions presently assumed by policy makers is realized. The reason for its inclusion is that the underlying approach is used in the calculator. The difference is that the calculator takes into account the limitations that they acknowledge in their article, for example:

• The realistic introduction of different generators providing “fill-in” power than that used without wind present.
• The limitation that emission and heat rate data they used did not cover all combinations of power and ramp rate.

Even so, according to the Knowledge Problem post, they have been criticized as overstating the need for backup power supplies by Mills et al, and that geographic diversity helps to smooth out variability. In an update to the post attention is drawn to the Milligan article. This article contains often used, and questionable, arguments to support the ability of wind to offset fuel consumption and the resulting emissions despite its high degree of variability. The following addresses some examples of these. [Read more →]

My initial post, “Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling: (Part I: A Framework and Calculator),” provided an overview of a fossil fuel and CO2 emissions calculator. It showed that industrial wind plants do not provide the claimed reductions in these important areas, which brings into question their value as good public policy.

This post provides some background, a base case and the results of taking necessary additional considerations into account. The base case has two scenarios.

The first is that every MWh of wind production directly reduces the full fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions for every MWh of the “displaced” fossil fuel plant, which is a very simplistic view.  The second takes some limited considerations into account, which can show that as much of 85 percent of the simplistic-view savings are still achieved. Calculator runs illustrate how similar results can be produced.

Background

A major consideration is the need for fast-responding gas generation plants to mirror or shadow wind’s highly volatile output, especially during periods of high wind production. Figure 1 illustrates the concept. The gas production is shown in black and is necessary to render wind’s output useful. As the gas production is the complement of that for wind, the vertical axis has to be read in reverse for gas. While operating in a wind-shadowing/wind-mirroring backup role, the gas turbine plants consume more gas and produce more CO2 emissions per MWh than in their normal mode of operation.

Figure 1 – Illustration of the Shadowing/Backup Concept

The calculator treats these two considerations separately. The first, fossil fuel consumption (gas) per MWh, is increased by an efficiency loss factor, or heat rate penalty. The second, CO2 emissions per MWh, is increased by another efficiency loss factor, which is greater than the heat rate penalty and non-linear. This second factor is derived from a paper by White and is not in addition to the heat rate penalty.

The calculator credits wind with the full electricity production contribution as measured over a year, [Read more →]

Editor Note: An environmental civil war is increasing in lockstep with the government’s forcing of industrial windpower. For previous posts against industrial wind parks by grassroot environmentalists, see here, here, here, and here.  Also see this different take at MasterResource on industrial wind “NIMBYism.”

The historic Hall of Flags in the rotunda of the state capitol in Augusta, Maine, was the setting for a November 6th press conference announcing the formation of the Citizens Task Force on Wind Power.  The group is a coalition of citizens from around the state drawn together in the common purpose of advocating for responsible, science based, economically and environmentally sound approaches to Maine’s energy policy, according to co-chair Steve Thurston.  Thurston highlighted the key concerns of the group in the release that is posted here.  Co-chair Monique Aniel, M.D., set the tone for the press conference by recounting how the arrogance of the developer of Record Hill Wind in Roxbury, Maine, ignited her concern over the siting of utility scale wind projects in Maine

Other speakers included economist J. Dwight  who addressed economic problems of wind energy; Gary Steinberg of Friends of Lincoln Lakes who spoke of denial of citizens rights  relating to permitting processes; Carolyn Dodge who spoke of wind developers’ violation of Native Americans’ respect for natural resources; Jon Carter of Forest Ecology Network who spoke of the devastating impact of wind development on the vast forests of the northern two-thirds of Maine.  Bringing the Press Conference to a close, Brad Blake of Friends of Lincoln Lakes used the scale of the Rollins Project proposed by First Wind to demonstrate the huge impact of the state’s goals for utility scale wind power for 2020.

Citizens Task Force on Wind Power is concerned that the state government under the leadership of Governor John Baldacci has committed the state to public policy that aggressively promotes development of utility scale wind projects without adequate citizen input to public policy and denial of citizen involvement in permitting processes. [Read more →]

Editor note: Mr. Hawkins’ study is presented to increase the interest in this highly important,  politically sensitive issue of incremental pollution from firming up industrial wind power. This post has been joined by Parts II-V, with Part V providing updates to the calculator and links to the other posts.

Integrating random, highly variable wind energy into an electricity system presents substantial problems that subvert wind technology’s ability to offset the use of fossil fuels–and avoid air emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO2). Measuring this accurately is important because many believe that wind projects significantly reduce such emissions.

This analysis finds that natural gas used as wind back-up in place of baseload or intermediate gas (in the absence of wind) results in approximately the same gas burn and an increase in related emissions, including CO2. Extrapolating from this example to the whole, the working hypothesis is that intermittent wind (and solar) are not effective CO2 mitigation strategies because of inefficiencies introduced by fast-ramping (inefficient) operation of gas turbines for firming otherwise intermittent and thus non-usable power.

Analysis

In the absence of extensive real-time load dispatch analyses at finely grained time intervals capable of accurately and sufficiently assessing all the variables affecting electricity system behavior as wind energy penetration increases, I propose a method – a calculator – that captures a wide range of considerations. I am unaware of any previous attempt that is as inclusive as what I present here and welcome reader comments for improvements on the present framework or alternative approaches.

This model, or calculator, provides a framework for the considerations involved and an interim assessment of their effects until sufficiently comprehensive studies can be performed in the areas indicated. It shows the impact on fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions compared to typical claims by wind proponents and other bodies, including some government policy makers. As it is parameter driven, the calculator allows examination of the sensitivity of these considerations. The result is that the typical claims are not supported, except by ignoring most of the following considerations:

• The amount of wind mirroring/shadowing backup required.
• Inefficient operation imposed on the mirroring/shadowing backup, in terms of both the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, treated separately.
• The need to make comparisons, with respect to gas plants, of:
  • Case A – The more efficient Combined Cycle plants (CCGT) operating alone, in other words without the presence of wind, versus;
  • Case B – The appropriate mix of gas plant type used to balance wind’s volatile output. This includes the need to introduce less efficient, but faster-reacting, Open Cycle Gas Turbine gas plants (OCGT) to mirror/shadow the wind production, especially as wind penetration increases.
• The effect of reduced wind capacity factor.
• The effect of wind output exceeding 1-2 percentage points of a total electricity system, on a country or regional basis.

The framework used is similar to that of Warren Katzenstein and Jay Apt (see citations below). It focuses on the wind/gas plant combination and has general applicability. Additional considerations involving wind’s impact on other electricity system elements particular to a specific jurisdiction, such as baseload capacity as analyzed by Campbell, will have to be assessed separately and could have implications that further offset wind’s claimed benefits. [Read more →]