Windy Promises
Here's an interesting item from Britain. It seems that the windy promises of low-cost wind energy are not exactly panning out. In fact, the rush to build wind farms is not working out very well at all.
Blowing in the wind: Millions wasted on wind farms without a breeze
For anyone building a wind farm, it might seem an unnecessary piece of advice - put it somewhere windy.
Astonishingly, however, many turbines are going up on sites which are simply not breezy enough, energy consultants have claimed.
They say farms are being built in the "wrong places" because of the pressure to hit Government targets in the race to produce green energy.
But the "badly sited and under performing" turbines are not reliable enough to keep the nation's television sets, toasters and lights switched on.
Michael Jefferson, an independent engineering consultant and former economist for Shell, said the industry often exaggerated the amount of energy each farm would supply.
New sites are assessed on the basis of average wind speeds over a year - a measure called the "load factor".
The industry recommends an average load factor of 30 per cent for a turbine to operate efficiently.
Yet although the load factor can be as high as 45 per cent in parts of Scotland and Wales, some farms achieve less than 20 per cent, he said.
Only five wind farms in the east of England achieve load factors of 30 per cent or more: "That's just five out of 25," he said.
"We should be putting our money where the wind is and that is quite often not where the development pressure is.
"Even in a high average-wind-speed area you really have to be absolutely precise as to where you site them.
But that is not the total soy. It actually gets worse:
"When you have a very large number of wind farms on the grid and that happens, you are talking about massive power swings on the system."
To cope with the variation in wind energy over a normal day, gas and coal generators would need to be turned on and off continually.
"They are not designed for that, and the net effect is to put them under mechanical strain and also increase their carbon dioxide," said Mr Oswald.
So, wind power is actually increasing the amount of global warming gasses in the atmosphere. Ahem, I told you there was a problem. This is not even taking into account the premature failures in the wind turbines that have been cropping up.
Look, there are really a lot of issues that require serious discussion. I'd like to see the world stop burning oil for fuel, personally. But a lot - a real lot - of the "solutions" being touted, or actually being rammed down the throat of people the world over, are not solutions at all. They are distractions, sideshows, misconceptions or outright frauds. They may, in fact, do much more harm than good. How many millions have already been wasted on feel-good solutions? How many more will be wasted in the future?
Bad Ideas, Economy, Energy, Environment | Gaius Thursday, 30 August , 2007
By MAJGross, Friday, 31 August , 2007 @ 5:50 am
The same old story all over again.
READY! FIRE! AIM!!!
Liberals the world over whimpering, “but I meant well”
By HeatherC, Friday, 31 August , 2007 @ 10:49 am
Another problem is transmission loss over distance from electrical generation to consumer. Windfarms are ugly and people don’t really want them near where the demand is… the controversy of locating windmills off Cape Cod comes to mind.