Reality Rears Its Ugly Head
The New York Times reports a real "duh" moment. At least it is a duh to any longtime readers here. They have finally noticed that there are real problems with wind power.
The reason is that in Texas, and most of the United States, the hottest days are the least windy. As a result, wind turns out to be a good way to save fuel, but not a good way to avoid building plants that burn coal. A wind machine is a bit like a bicycle that a commuter keeps in the garage for sunny days. It saves gasoline, but the commuter has to own a car anyway.
Xcel Energy, which serves eight states from North Dakota to Texas and says it is the nation’s largest retailer of wind energy, is eager to have more. Wind is “abundant and popular,” said Richard C. Kelly, the chairman, president and chief executive, speaking at a recent conference on renewable energy.
But Frank P. Prager, managing director of environmental policy at the company, said that the higher the reliance on wind, the more an electricity transmission grid would need to keep conventional generators on standby — generally low-efficiency plants that run on natural gas and can be started and stopped quickly.
He said that in one of the states the company serves, Colorado, planners calculate that if wind machines reach 20 percent of total generating capacity, the cost of standby generators will reach $8 a megawatt-hour of wind. That is on top of a generating cost of $50 or $60 a megawatt-hour, after including a federal tax credit of $18 a megawatt-hour.
By contrast, electricity from a new coal plant currently costs in the range of $33 to $41 a megawatt-hour, according to experts. That price, however, would rise if the carbon dioxide produced in burning coal were taxed, a distinct possibility over the life of a new coal plant. (A megawatt-hour is the amount of power that a large hospital or a Super Wal-Mart would use in an hour.)
Without major advances in ways to store large quantities of electricity or big changes in the way regional power grids are organized, wind may run up against its practical limits sooner than expected.
They make a lot of the same observations that I did when I wrote this post not long after I started the Crabitat. You should read the article in the Times, though. There are a lot of different initiatives to try to address storage. To my eye at this point, most of them wont work out really well, but they are at least trying a few creative ideas. The biggest problem is the sheer loss of efficiency of converting wind into electricity into some other form of energy and then back to electricity.
