Jim’s right. Follow the money. “Big Wind” — really? Compare the subsidies granted wind energy to those granted oil and gas. They don’t have to even tell us what they’re doing on fracking. They still haven’t cleaned up the Gulf. No responsibility whatever for the carbon they throw in the atmosphere. Wars. Plus outright, direct subsidies of all kinds.

“Big Wind?” It’s the methane coming out of the author’s behind that is the big wind.

Mike – are you part of the online astroturf “Wind Army”?

Wind Industry Sponsored Online Blogging Alive, Well and Against the Law?

http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/wind-industry-sponsored-online-blogging-alive-well-and-against

Great column, David. Those commentators here that claim wind subsidies anemically compare with those for fossil fuel generation exemplify much that is skewed about this discussion. First, oil plays little part as a fuel for electricity generation–and wind is only an electricity “producer.” Second, on a kWh production basis, wind receives 26 times the subsidy of fossil fuel producers. Third, wind can neither be an alternative source of power for coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear–nor can it be an additive source of power. In fact, it can’t be a modern source of power for anyone. To understand why, perhaps your readers should imagine a world where government mandates that, say, a tenth of the nation’s air transport be in the form of gliders, hoping against hope that the latter can replace those gas guzzling 747s. The idea is patently absurd. As it is for wind turbines in the electricity sector. There’s a reason the Dutch stopped using windmills to pump water when they discovered the steam engine.

Wind is not David to coal’s Goliath. Rather, wind is David to coal’s Bathsheba. Despite having 42 GW of installed wind in the USA, not a single coal plant has closed in consequence–and fossil fuel production continues to increase. No one loves wind more than GE, NextEra, Siemens, Shell, BP, ExxonMobile, Weyerhaeuser, AES–all companies swaddled in coal, all companies that use wind not to diminish their fossil fuel portfolios but rather as a tax shelter to enhance their corporate bottom lines.

Those who seek to profit by selling windshine, which rhymes literally and metaphorically with moonshine, should also tell its public any machine that attempts to convert the randomly diffuse energy of the wind into modern power will perform like a lemon–that is, like a defective appliance, in terms of modern machine performance expecations. Relying upon sputtering “found” energy was the basis of tail wagging the dog ancient power. Yes, there’s a lot of wind energy flowing in and around the earth, much like there is a trillion dollars worth of diamonds just beneath the earth’s surface. Problem is that it would require many trillions of dollars to extract and refine it. The Second Law is such a brute….

David:
In some far future, a newer technology might replace oil. But that technology will have nothing to do with the present ensemble of “renewables.” With wind, for example, the problem is the nature of its “fuel;” modern wind machines are reasonably efficient in converting that fuel into “power.” Problem is that the fuel’s limitations mandate that any machine performance from it will be of the ancient power variety, typically nondispatchable and uncontrollable, requiring us to wait upon it rather than being responsive to the here and now in ways that make more time available to do something else.

But there’s a more fundamental problem with your desire in this context. This thread is focused upon electricity, which constitutes about 39% of our energy use. Nationally, we use oil for only 1% of our electricity generation. The nation’s largest grid system uses oil for around 0.4% of its electricity production.

Wind therefore, even if it worked, would do virtually nothing to achieve your desire.

But let me ask you to marinate your present thinking about oil in the text of Robert Bryce’s important book, Power Hungry. I think you would benefit greatly. Cheers!

Mike Barnard’s comments here are both disingenuous and propagandistic. By any rational measure, wind receives at least 26 times the subsidy of fossil fuels on a kWh production basis–but for generation that provides no effective capacity, which is essential for getting abundant, secure, reliable electricity at prices affordable by all. Comparing the levelized costs of wind with those of conventional generation is more than absurd, much like comparing the cost of the most dysfunctional lemon with the best engineered automobile in history.

Wind has had 20 years of strident subsidy. It has become clear that those subsides are designed to turn wind into a tax sheltering commodity for large corporations with a lot of income to “protect”–virtually all of which are heavily invested in fossil fuels as well.

Don’t be gulled by Barnard’s line of reasoning about wind backup. All conventional power plants, including nuclear, require, for grid security considerations, redundancy, mostly because of planned outages. In this sense, all electricity generation is, to one degree or another, intermittent. But conventional generation is always predictable/dispatchable and never variable, unless called upon to vary by controllers in response to demand. If any conventional unit behaved otherwise–behaved like wind generation does–it would quickly be taken off line. And if the defect couldn’t be repaired, the unit would be decommissioned.

Conventional generators are “back-uped” by generation similar to themselves–that is, units that have high levels of effective capacity and are nimbly controllable and dispatchable. In this, they satisfy the ordinary definition of backup, which means a reserve or substitute for the real thing, often in the form of an understudy or a computer file: the backup is sufficiently like the original (what is backed up) that performance should not be markedly corrupted. A second string quarterback should in virtually all important respects be able to do what the first string quarterback does. Ditto for an understudy forced into mainline service because of illness to the diva.

However, given the erratic, skittering, largely unpredictable nature of its delivery, wind cannot be “back up” by a slightly corrupted version of itself. Quite the contrary. It is as if wind is the whacky substitute requiring the first team, the diva, to make it functional. Indeed, it is the backup in this case that does virtually all the work–but in a much more inefficient fashion. How would the world’s best actor squelch, live onstage, a drunken understudy who continually spoke lines from another play?

To say that wind requires backup is to pervert both language and meaning. Wind machines must always be deeply ENTANGLED with proactive but inefficiently operating conventional machines throughout the entire extent of the wind machine’s installed capacity.

The nature of wind variability, which routinely changes its output 5% or more at every five-minute interval and occasionally widely alters what it delivers in a very short time, means that wind is a wayward fish to conventional generation’s bicycle; it is a completely different creature both in degree and kind. Given that wind generates an average of only a fourth of its full capacity annually, nearly 75% of that capacity must therefore consist of conventional generation—in order to keep supply matched to demand. Given that 10-15% of the time it produces nothing, then 100% of its full capacity must be taken over by conventional machines. The truth is that wind can only be a minor ingredient in a much larger fuel mix—but much like a fly in soup, which provides, like wind, problematic nutritional value. You could eat it. But why would you want to?

Yes, every conventional generator is intermittent to some extent or another. Natural gas units, for example, are highly intermittent because of operator choice, since many are used to follow the vicissitudes of demand at peak demand times. Over the course of a year they may, because of that “intermittence,” produce less than a wind machine. But those gas units are controllable, dispatachable, retractable, and predictable 99.999 % of the time; if they were not, they would be decommissioned. Wind represents inebriated intermittence, the very antithesis of modern suppliers deployed to engage demand flux.

However, intermittence is not the issue. If wind were only intermittent but produced at a steady rate, it might actually do some good. But, unlike conventional units that vary only because operators change its output, wind is highly and blindly variable at the cube of the wind speed, often unpredictably changing its output 5% or more at five minute intervals, and sometimes careening the entire range of its installed capacity in an hour. In short, it behaves like negative demand–on steroids. Expensive efforts have been made to forecast it, all unsuccessful. No one can predict what wind output will be at any future time.

Only politicians, the craven, and engineers who enjoy profiting through make work would subvert the match between supply and demand–from the supply side, of all things. Although it can be expensively integrated into the system so that it doesn’t generally affect what the consumer receives, it can’t replace the dependable machines that make the system work. Since wind output is always fluctuating unpredictably, uncontrollably throughout the entire range of its capacity, it existentially behaves much like a wandering piccolo that creeps into a symphonic orchestra production without concern for keeping time, without even any sense of the score. This piccolo—wind—is indeed an additive instrument. But much in the way that a fly is additive to soup.

Unreliable and uncontrollable wind machines cannot replace machines that are reliable and controllable, for it is the latter that does all the important work, in the process making renewables like only appear to be reliable and controllable by the way they shadow wind’s sputtering delivery. In most areas around the country, fossil-fired machines, mainly coal but increasingly natural gas, must produce on average about 75% of wind’s maximum capacity—and, when no wind production occurs, which is often the case at times of peak demand for electricity, they must provide all of that capacity.

Since their desultory, unpredictable performance is inimical to that of the performance of reliable, high capacity machines, wind especially cannot complement any modern power portfolio as part of a “multi-pronged policy.” Although a consideration of the use of gliders in the air transport sector may reveal how problematic wind energy is as a means of generating electricity, it does not truly convey the hapless reality. For gliders have pilots who can negotiate thermal air pockets to obtain some directional control, thereby achieving a measure of productivity, as inconvenient and slow as it may be in terms of modern air transport expectations.

Despite nearly 200GW of installed wind capacity around the world, no coal plants have closed anywhere in consequence, and more are in the offing. Because of how conventional units, in most cases coal around the country, make wind “integration” possible, virtually all corporations that all heavily invested in fossil fuel production are also heavily invested in wind, knowing that wind will only enhance their fossil fuel markets.

There’s a reason the Dutch converted their windmills to tourist traps 200 years ago, when the millers discovered the wonders of the steam engine. Wind provides no modern power. Any calculation about commercial machine systems that convert energy into power must also factor how those systems affect productivity. Again, let me ask readers here who don’t know much about electricity production to consider how productivity would plummet if, say, 20% of the nation’s air transport sector was “powered” by gliders. This is precisely what is happening with wind and electricity: everyone and everything involved in making wind possible is working overtime–at great cost, both in dollars and carbon emissions.