Here's a story for you: wind energy is a scam. To keep costs attractive, lots of things are being left out of the discussion.
It's a big scam, it's right out in the open and nobody cares. How can this be? Easy, there's a lot of money involved and the people who know most about the scam are the ones getting the money and they aren't about to say anything that will stop the flow. It's politically incorrect to say anything negative about "renewables", so people who do know better are stifled in what they can say. I'm a nobody, however, so I can say anything I want. Let's back up and take it from the start.
Everyone knows that "the grid" distributes electricity from the power station to the end user. In fact, just referring to "the grid" makes it seem like you're smart and know what you're talking about. But the grid is actually pretty complex. It has to do more than wire things together. In addition to running just the right amount of current through all of the various wires (too much and those wires can heat up and cause problems), the grid has to be redundant, it has to maintain a universal frequency and it has to keep the power factor as near to 1.0 as possible.
The redundancy is what makes it a "grid" and not a tree. Various parts of the distribution network are tied together, so that if one part of the network fails, power can be routed around it. This means that there are lots of interconnections that have to be managed very exactly, any misconnection can be catastrophic.
The electricity in the United States is alternating current, with a frequency of sixty cycles per second (called sixty hertz). All of the devices in the grid and all of the devices that connect to the grid (such as your dishwasher) are optimized to work at sixty hertz. Lots of things, like electrical motors, won't work if the frequency varies by much. Now, think about a conventional generator that is powered by a gas turbine. As more and more load is applied to a motor, what happens? It strains under the load and slows down. This must not be allowed, because that lowers the frequency from its appointed sixty hertz. Also, all of the generators around the grid must be "in phase". This means that the electrical current is alternating exactly in time with all of the rest of the current. New plants coming on line must be exactly matched to the phase of the grid.
Power factor isn't so easy to understand. In an alternating current circuit, power factor is the ratio of real power to apparent power, which has to do with the phase of not just voltage, but current as well. Ideally, current is exactly in step with voltage. When the voltage peaks, the current peaks as well. But inductive loads (such as electrical motors) can shift things so that current and voltage don't line up. When this happens, the actual power that the circuit can produce is lowered. This is bad, because your customers can't get as much use out of the electricity as they should be able to. If it gets bad enough, it can even damage some inductive loads. To fix this, the people who run the grid have to put capacitors around throughout the grid to offset the inductive loads. You can see these on power poles all around your town, if you know what to look for. Here's a long explanation of power factor, if you want the details.
Lastly, the grid has to balance. Exactly as much power must go into it as comes out of it. There is no place to store any energy. The actual customer demand is small in the middle of the night. As people wake up and start using more electricity, the people who run the grid have to pump in more power. As demand increases, new power plants are brought on line to keep things balanced. Those power plants can't just be switched on like a light bulb, however. They have to to be synchronized with the grid. This means they have to be up and running, ready to go, before they're needed. This is called "spinning reserves". At any time the grid operators have to have spinning reserves ready to satisfy any expected demand. The spinning reserves don't use as much fuel as they will when they're actually producing electricity, but they use some fuel and, of course, their staff has to be on the job just as if they were producing electricity.
I've gone into all of this stuff about the grid because it's important to realize that the grid has its limits. It doesn't like big fluctuations of any sort. It's complex and it can exhibit weird second-order effects. Every source of power isn't the same. Different kinds of generation take shorter or longer times to bring onto the grid. The most important grid metric is its ability to meet demand when demand peaks, not when demand is low.
So, what does all of this have to do with wind energy? Wind energy is variable. In fact, in some places – such as California – wind energy comes along almost exactly when you don't need it: at night and in the winter. Remember, the grid has to balance. If it's the middle of the night and the wind picks up, you've got to shunt that energy somewhere. If worst comes to worst, the grid operators actually pay a business to use it. The reverse is even worse. When the wind is blowing and stops, you've got to have spinning reserves up and ready to take over. This means that for every kilowatt of wind energy you have on the grid, you've got to have a kilowatt of conventional power plant standing by, up and spinning, to take over if the wind dies. This cost is not mentioned when the cost of wind power is discussed, it just gets swept under the rug.
It can't be that simple, can it? I'm just some guy pulling all of this out of his butt, right? Nope, this one is pretty simple to verify. At iTunes U, the part of the iTunes store devoted to publishing free content from universities, there is a speech by Jim Detmers, VP of Operations for the California ISO, aka "the grid". Here's the URL, if you have iTunes you can download it for free for yourself:
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.1291176865.01291176868.1427408599?i=1204795563
The speech was given at an energy conference at Stanford in the fall of 2007. Most of the speech is a long plea for help. His grid simply wasn't designed for the "renewable" power (mostly wind and some solar cells) that he's being told by the legislature that it will have to carry. "We've got a huge, enormous challenge in trying to bring on renewables," he says at about 2:45 into the speech. At 6:45 he says, "They also have a target out there of 33% percent, [of renewables] and I've got that down here. I don't know what that means, what we have to put onto this system. Honestly."
About wind's unreliability he says: "Wind is not produced on peak. This last summer, when we went across the summer peak, I had 3,000 megawatts of capacity of wind. How much did I have on the summer peak, back in August? No, no, no, I didn't have zero. I had a total of 63 out of 3,000. And we're investing all of this money in wind..." (at around 10:15). Clearly, the wind let him down when he needed it most.
Later on, he talks about energy produced when it's not needed and how his capacity to store energy is limited. "I actually get to the point where I have to pay people to take the energy off the system. Get this straight: I am paying people to take the energy away from me because I am in over supply. Because wind comes up when I can't predict it, and it's all coming in off-peak. I deal with that system today. If we only increase that... help us. Please help us." (14:00). "The wind, this is the one that I like the most, because it presents the most challenges for me on the grid. And the train has already left the station. Contracts are already in place now to bring on about 7,500 additional megawatts of wind on to the system, and I have no place to put it off-peak." (17:30) "I hope everyone in this room walks away and clearly understands that wind has what I call an inverted supply curve. The maximum production of wind is off-peak. Do I need power off-peak? The answer is no! I'm already swimming in the megawatts today! Because I have to keep on-line all of those generators to be there when the wind's not there on the peak. I have to keep them on. Are we achieving and economic benefit from that? ... We may be costing [ourselves] an enormous amount of money... We're making decisions as an industry, as a state, as the United States and around the world because we want it so bad. And we're using existing technology, existing wind, but we're not marrying with that storage capability." (18:00)
The California legislature has said he has to produce 20% of his power through renewables, and that's about all he thinks he can handle. "So, what does it take to integrate renewables into this picture, onto this very, very complex system? Well, the 20%, that's about 13,000 megawatts of renewables that has to come in. ... we can incorporate the 20% with today's grid. But, I have to also say, that's exhausting all of the existing resources that we have. That will make sure that I keep all of the existing gas-loaded generation on and available. We have to re-power the old units, we are not displacing anything and I have to keep all of them on and available." (18:20) For 33% or 50%, he has no answer.
So, those spinning reserves have to be there, in case the "renewables" drop off line. It's not just the capriciousness of sun and wind, either. If you listen in, you'll hear him describe how, during the fires of summer 2007, the Santa Anna winds were blowing too hard and the wind turbines shut down. The smoke from the fires and dust kicked up by the wind blotted out the sun and took the solar power offline too. "If I had actually made the decision to rely on that wind and I didn't have those thermal units available, most of southern California would have been shut off... and it would have been shut off for over a week." (21:40)
And the cost of wind isn't honestly calculated: "We need to understand the cost-effectiveness of wind. So, when you bring on wind, it's not just [enough] to tie on the new wind. You have to tie on the wind, you have to have a peaking resource, you also have to have the storage technology, you have to have the transmission to bring it in from remote areas. So, what's the cost? Maybe four times what we're using today in the form of cost. At least. At least. We need to understand that."
Listen to the whole thing. He's very aware that he can't say bad things about renewables, I suspect it would cost him his job to do so. But he clearly lays out facts that expose the scam that is wind (and that's mostly what they mean by "renewables" in California). If you don't couple wind with some form of storage, you're not really saving any conventional power plants and you may be generating a lot of electricity that comes in when you can't use it. The cost is at least four times what they're telling us, because they're not including all of the outside costs, such as spinning reserves (the "peaking resource" he talks about), transmission and storage (which isn't a cost today, because they don't bother and the energy is just wasted or someone is paid to use it).
It's a big scam and we're all going to pay an enormous sum of money for something that doesn't do us much good at all. In a few years, you're going to hear a news story about how California has met its goal of producing 20% of its power from renewables. When you hear that, just remember that all of their old, gas-fired power plants are still online anyway, standing by to catch the ball when the wind stops. All of the billions of dollars spent won't actually shut down a single conventional power plant. Global warming and CO2 emissions? Not nearly as much progress as you will be lead to believe. The script is already written. As Detmers says: the train has left the station.
Update: and here's a concrete example of the above in action: Power grid narrowly averted rolling blackouts. The story tells of how the wind suddenly quit blowing in west Texas at 6:41PM on Tuesday the 26th of February, 2008. This meant "wind power production plummeted Tuesday evening from about 1,700 megawatts to about 300 megawatts". ERCOT had to immediately cut power to its "interruptible customers" while it sought to bring other generation on-line. Apparently, there was also a "failure of several energy providers to reach scheduled production" during the event, which I take to mean that some spinning reserves that were supposed to be on-line to back up the wind power were not there when they needed them.
Expect a lot more of this in Texas and California. The grid is barely keeping up now, and we're only adding more and more unstable renewables to make things worse.
Update: Now, it looks like Detmer's fears are starting to materialize. From a Story in the Wall Street Journal, we hear this:
California's utilities are barreling ahead to try to meet a state mandate to garner 33% of their power from renewable sources by 2020, and some officials are concerned the effort might push up electricity prices and crimp supplies.
The state auditor warned this week that the electricity sector poses a "high risk" to the state economy. A staff report from the state energy commission also warns that California could find itself uncomfortably tight on power by 2011 if problems continue to pile up.
Utilities complain that the ambitious renewable-energy mandates, combined with tougher environmental regulations on conventional plants, are compromising their ability to deliver adequate power. "Conflicting state policies are a problem," said Stuart Hemphill, senior vice president of procurement at Southern California Edison, a unit of Edison International of Rosemead, Calif.
So, years before the fact, Detmers had seen where it was all going. For all of the renewables on the grid, you have to have backup generation available. At some point, you have so many renewables online that you don't have the backup capacity to step in if the wind or sun fails. Since storage of the renewable electricity is so expensive, you've short-cut that step and fed the grid directly from your wind turbines. When the wind stops, on any random day, you have a blackout. For all the billions and billions of dollars you've poured into your systems, you've created an unreliable, black-out prone system that produces electricity (when it does) at far higher rates than neighboring states, but can't guarantee juice on any given day. That, in turn, adds fuel to the negative business climate that you have created through the taxation to create the unreliable beast in the first place.
Ta-da!
Update: And now, a couple of years later, the Wall Street Journal picks up the scent in an article titled, Unbridled Energy: Predicting Volatile Wind, Sun. They, of course, don't see wind as a scam, just an unfortunately unruly source of power. Here's a quote that underscores my point:
Currently, every wind farm and solar installation has to be backed up by a nearly equivalent amount of conventional fuel to keep the power grid running. That raises costs.
They keep this simple statement of fact low key, but it's an incredible admission. If all of the solar and wind farm installations have to be backed up by "a nearly equivalent amount of conventional fuel," then the wind and solar isn't actually doing anything for us, is it? We're spinning our turbines so that we can look good, all the while a nasty old coal plant, off in the distance where no one can link it to the wind farm, is churning out CO2 like mad. The guy writing the article doesn't know anything about power plants, either. A big coal plant can take 48 hours to spin up and match to the grid. Even a small gas turbine plant takes several hours to fire up. Unless they think that the wind predictors can predict wind speeds 24 hours or more in advance (and I'll bet they can't), better prediction won't mean anything.
Wind power: still a scam after all these years!
