While an impressive amount of total new wind power capacity had been installed in the US last year, proposed offshore wind projects have not fared so well in the US. As a result, the US currenly has no full-scale offshore wind installations (that I'm aware of).

In New England we have the NIMBY effect hard at work.

In the mid-Atlantic, a 150-turbine wind farm proposed by Bluewater Wind, and which would have been located 11 miles off the southern part of the Delaware shore, is currently the victim of some rather unseemly political intrigue and probably has a less than 50/50 chance of ever being built. The local power provider, Delmarva Power, wants no part of any long-term contract that would force it to buy power from Bluewater Wind and has been using its influence in the Delaware Legislature to scuttle the project. To add insult to injury, it wants to pass along to its power customers all the money it has spent on consultants and lawyers in its attempts to discredit the project.

So, not all is not rosey on the wind front.

quikSCAT map shows where the real wind (30+ knots) is

http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/hires_day_qf.pl

click on any area to see the detailed distributions

if the wind pattern changes significantly which is likely as the climate change accelerates.

The volume of the resource might change slightly, but a good windy site will stay windy.

The Great Plains have nothing but barbed wire between the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, this will not change. The Arctic will still be colder than the GoM. This is also true of more localized windy places as well.

Best Hopes for Wind to continue transferring heat & cold,

Alan

Properly located they are fine , we have a wind farm zone near our city of 75,000 (Palmerston North, NZ )with several hundred turbines from the smaller ones to giant 3MW. The 31 3MW have been up for almost a year and at any one time about a quarter are out of action due to mechanical problems, bearings usually, blades delaminating and in one case a blade simply falling off.At 45m I bet that sure made a dent in the ground. 8 were out of action yesterday. The wind appears to be too strong with violent swings in direction. The wear and tear is a significant ongoing cost. This may well be that the Manawatu has the wrong turbines and that the ridge tops of the Tararuas, only a few hundred metres from an active fault line, is simply the wrong place for them. Whatever, I hope this tempers some of the optomism held by those who think they are a magic bullet.
This was in our local paper recently.

Wednesday, 02 January 2008

Energy strategy risks power shortages
There is a significant risk of power shortages from the Government's aim for 90 per cent renewable power and prices will rise, according to former Electricity Commission chairman Roy Hemmingway.

The Government's Energy Strategy, announced in December, will also impose a 10-year ban on building new fossil fuel power stations in an effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Hemmingway left the job as Electricity Commission chairman at the end of 2006, at the end of an often turbulent three years. At that time, he openly criticised Energy Minister David Parker as an "interventionist" who appeared to think he was nearly always right.

Now living in the United States again, Hemmingway told BusinessDay the original Energy Strategy drafted by government officials was "fairly well balanced". But Hemmingway said he understood that the more "extreme reliance" on renewable energy was substituted by Parker himself.

"More renewables are necessary if New Zealand is to meet climate change targets. However, in my opinion, the government's policy puts so much emphasis on renewables to the exclusion of other generation sources that the power supply is at risk," Hemmingway said.

He warned against an over-reliance on wind power.

"The most likely and abundant source of renewable electricity is wind, and wind is unpredictable," Hemmingway said.

It was possible to predict the amount of wind energy available over the course of a whole year, but it was "very difficult" to predict how much wind power might be possible at the exact time it was needed to meet demand, he said.

"Given that New Zealand has begun to experience issues around meeting peak demand, there is a very serious problem with relying on wind," he said.

There were not enough other forms of renewable power such as hydro and geothermal stations that would provide a more reliable power supply.

"Power prices will rise, simply because new sources of supply, of all kinds, are more expensive than the old sources," Hemmingway said.

Banning non-renewable power from coal or gas fired stations potentially meant generators would have to turn to more expensive sources driving up prices.

Hemmingway did not estimate the potential impact on prices from the policy. However, independent electricity consultant Bryan Leyland has recently estimated the price of power could rise 30 to 40 per cent within a few years as a result.

Previous Electricity Commission figures suggest wind would cost 11 cents a unit, about twice the present cost of coal or gas. The Wind Energy Association says wind would cost between 7c and 10c a unit.

Bank economists have estimated government policies will see the price of petrol rise 4 per cent and electricity rise 7 per cent, at least, adding to the risks of inflation for the Reserve Bank.

New Zealand is already a world leader in renewable power, producing about two-thirds of its electricity mainly from hydro power, with smaller amounts of geothermal and wind power. Most Australian electricity, by comparison comes from coal-fired power stations.

About half of all New Zealand's greenhouse gases are methane from farm animals.

New Zealand produces about 200g of CO2 for each kilowatt of power produced, about one-fifth of the average CO2 of Australian power. France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, is one of the few countries with lower CO2 emissions from power generation.

If more wind farms were built, they would have to be "where the wind blows", and not necessarily near where people use most power, such as Auckland. That meant more transmission lines would be needed than for a power plant in Auckland.

Hemmingway pointed out it would be easier to build another gas-fired power station at Contact Energy's Otahuhu plant in Auckland, which already has consents as an operating power station, than seek consents for new generation.

The power system would also need more back-up power stations to meet peak demand when the wind was not blowing, Hemmingway said.

State owned Genesis Energy was told by Parker in October not to proceed with any plans for thermal power generators.

However, a recent Court of Appeal judgment said the application for the proposed gas-fired Genesis station at Rodney, north of Auckland was still alive. Sources have indicated the station could yet be built to handle peaks in demand, rather than a base-load station operating almost full time. Genesis has said it was "still reviewing" the Rodney plant, but if it went ahead it would meet the requirements of the government's Energy Strategy.

Hemmingway said security of supply was always an issue for New Zealand's power system because of the unpredictable nature of water running into hydro lakes. That would be made worse by an even greater reliance on hydro and wind, as against the more predictable power from gas or coal.

For most of this year, hydro lake storage levels have been running under the long-run 80-year average.

Wholesale power prices started to rise from extremely low levels of just 2c a unit in early November as storage levels dropped, to more than 8c a unit in mid-December.

Prices have since fallen back somewhat, with rising lake storage levels, now about 90 per cent of average, up from 78 per cent full a month earlier.

It had been expected to be a dry summer and lake levels had reached a level where operators should be cautious, according to electricity consultant Leyland.

Low lake levels showed the importance of having gas and coal-fired power stations that could be brought on when needed, Leyland said.

He pointed out Contact Energy has now permanently closed its old 300 megawatt New Plymouth power station, at a cost of $25 million, reducing available generation.

In September, asbestos was found in areas of the 31-year-old plant where it had not been previously recorded and the plant was immediately shut down. The loss of New Plymouth meant the system had less back-up generation than before the introduction of the emergency supply Whirinaki station in Hawkes Bay.

And that increased the risks if there was a station failure.

"We are always at risk of the major failure at one of the big gas turbines and it is not a risk we should underestimate," Leyland said.

There is also reduced transmission capacity on the Cook Strait power cable, down by about a third, adding to concerns about power supply.

On the other hand, Contact will get a fast-track consent process for its planned $500 million Te Mihi geothermal station near Taupo.

Leyland said if the summer was dry the system could be "easily be in serious trouble next winter".

http://science.reddit.com/info/661qr/comments/

Seems busted.

Yet plenty of horses can be seen in the picture.

People are going to go to electric cars, scooters, and other small vehicles that take them where they want to go. Mass transit is not sufficiently personal.

growing at nearly 50% or even 25% could quickly bring wind up to 3-5% in the US. I wonder how fast micro wind is growing? in the future I bet many people plug their PHEV into their wind and solar energy systems. if we get solar paint and shingles homes could be power plants. a big wasteful mcmansion in the subrurbs could be a power plant and a small home might not be able to produce enough of it's own energy.

"capacity additions in 2007 still translate in 5 times more kWh coming from gas than from wind just for the new capacity.

guess wind has to start growing even faster or we need to not add as many plants.

Aren't royalties and consumption tax revenues on oil and gas several times massiver, so that those industries, together with their customers, are net subsidizers of government rather than the other way around?

Not if you count the whole road construction budget, the whole DoD budget (whose main purpose seems to be the protection of oil imports), road patrol, emergency services, and the huge externalities which are not paid for by the industry.

PTC was designed for industrial wind power, and works well for that - it's easy enough to bring in tax investors that get the PTC and re-inject most of it in the project for a small fee. I don't really work on the small scale projects, so can't really comment on the ART, but it probably makes sense to have a mechanism that could be used without requiring sophisticated financial (fiscal) engineering.

As to ugliness, I agree - I always find wind turbines a fascinating, spectacular sight. But there's no easy argument against people that find them ugly, other than to say that it's a different kind of price to pay than what we pay for other forms of energy.

I think they're majestic. In any case, no where near as ugly as a coal fired plant.

I'd be a lot more impressed by the growth rates of solar and wind if prices were falling. To sustain these growth rates prices must fall.

SCT has proposed the same for the declining rigs on north sea. ammonia plant on rig. add a flotilla of floating turbines around can further improve the cost effectiveness.

Thanks for the nit: corrected.

The problem with existing offshore platforms is that you cannot put a lot of turbines on each, and that they are often pretty far from shore, and not necessarily in the best places (for wind or for sea conditions) as it was the oil resources driving that... Operations and maintenance would likely be very costly.

On the other hand, the project I'm working on right now, Eclipse (you can google stuff on it) has plans to build an offshore wind farm on the site of a small gas field, and put up a gas turbine offshore, to use the gas from the field and produce power to complement the wind farm's output.

This is something that I hope to be able to write about more in the future (probably not before next year, though)

I would think that no power company in the world could possibly be stupid enough to think that the wind always blows and that they would not need to arrange for power supplies.
But that was before I found out what happened in Auckland a few years ago.
Some financial types took over the city power supply and cut expenses by firing all the sensible people (who tended to make more money and be more difficult to deal with) and put some empty suits in charge. When they skimped on maintenance the power lines kept getting older and older, and then the first of one of the four power lines into Auckland went down. Insulation gets old and when the power goes up, the temperature goes up, so the resistance goes up, so they send more power, so the temperature goes up...
They sent all the power through the other three and started arranging repairs. A few days later, the second went down. They sent all the power throgh two power lines. No rotating blackouts, just kept sending the power. Several hours later the third line fried. They kept sending the power, no blackouts, and a few minutes later the last line fried.
Auckland's CBD was out of power for days while they strung power lines through the streets.
So it is not impossible for a Texas power company to do something that stupid. Unlikely, probably Liberal propaganda trying to show that all those Conservative executives should be replaced by political appointees, but after Auckland I won't say impossible.

If true, that would be pretty damn stupid. Wind is intermitten. That can be managed on a systems-wide basis to a good extent, but certainly not locally and over very short periods.

But running any electrical network without backup sounds insane.

I sent an e-mail to one of my contacts at Austin Energy, with a link to your comment.

The most recent news item I could find regarding Austin Energy & wind power:

http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/011408kvuegreenchoice-cb.2007c797.html

Regarding billp's comment, the response from Austin Energy:

Jeffrey, the story and the resulting brown out never happened.

Kiashu: its both better -and worse than your stated case. The good sites are developed first, and with early crappy technology like Altamont pass here, which is littered with falling down first generation turbines. Then when good highly efficient turbines are developed they have to find less ideal sites. So in that sense it is worse than you stated while the good sites never produce much power because of the outdated technology. In another way it is less bad, as wind turbines become larger and taller they are able to benefit from the stronger more steady winds at higher elevation.

I saw something last week about wind turbines proposed for the great lakes, freshwater offshore. Some of the offshore porblems should be lessor (no salt corrosion), and generally less active sea(lake) state. Plus water depths are pretty moderate. I can't find the source of the report (durn it).

20% is indeed the reality in Germany and some other countries; I understand that the numbers are quite higher in the US given that the wind resource is a lot better - and there are a lot more sites.

I was just giving the number as order of magnitudes to remind people what the capacity factor means, and that MW and MWh are not the same thing - which the regulars of the site surely know, but that more casual readers may confuse more easily (as can be seen in the media and in some of the arguments used against wind).

No, there are plenty of places still left.

Only Denmark so far has shown a certain trend of load factor decline, and Germany some trend but not so strong and obvious.

In Denmark's case, they are a physically small country, densely-populated. So they've not a lot of space to put power plants of any kind.

A load factor decline from saturation is likely to be far less extreme in the US, Australia, Algeria, and just as strong in somewhere like Singapore.

However, I think that because of NIMBYism, pork-barrelling of marginal electorates and plain old corruption and incompetence, it's likely that the best sites won't always be chosen even in our less densely-populated countries like Australia and the US. If there's a 30% site near some mansions, and a 15% site near some old industrial suburb, there's no question where the things will be built.

In a relatively untouched market I'd expect 30% or so, in an older market or place with a relatively corrupted political process I'd expect 20% on average.

Picking up an aluminum can is too expensive in time and money to be profitable. Picking up a fifty ton aluminum can is very, very, profitable. Leave one alone on the street for a week and see if it is still there the next week.

Wind power is one of the very few industrie in the world where governments require that you pay upfront the decommissioning costs, in the from of bonds, or deposits, for amounts decided by public authorities. So the money is there, paid for, to dismantle structures at the end of their useful life (25 years).

It would be nice if all other industrial (and non-industrial) activities were asked to do the same.

In practice, sites with old turbines are expecte to often be used for "repowering", ie replacing them with larger models. In some cases, the exisitng foundations can bear larger turbines and are re-used; most of the time they will be taken down and replaced.

It's just a big box on top of steel or concret towers, it's not very difficult to dismantle.

Good question - and one that, being in the right middle of it, I ask myself daily.

The hope we cling to is that this is a business with highly predictable and understandable revenues, especially in countries with feed-in tariffs (or projects with PPAs - power purchase agreements), so they will actually be even more attractive to investors looking for safe havens for their money. Also, risks are in plain view and well understood, so there is no downside to the sector. A lot of the crisis had to do with poor risk analysis and exuberant revenue projections in the future, and these are mostly absent in the sector, as least on the debt side.

So far, business is still trneding up rather than down, but we'll see how it goes

Failure to understand the exponential function...

As the quote says in the upper right corner,

We are just going through the maturing of the technology and industry, finding out what works and where the problems are. Soon "we" will be able to get serious and start to have a significant impact.

10% of US electricity from wind in a decade is a very doable goal. And 50% in 25 years is doable.

Alan

One criticism is that electrified rail trades 20 BTUs of oil for 1 BTU of electricity.

The power sources of wind, solar, hydro & nuke electricity have no other large scale economic uses. (OK roof space has to compete between solar hot water heaters & solar PV). But it takes 3 BTUs of coal to make 1 BTU of electricity, so your analysis shows that BAU does not need a flat energy supply. We can get by with less by simply switching freight from truck to electrified rail, and people into Urban Rail.

IMHO, these are not profound revolutions to BAU (although such are needed).

Best Hopes,

Alan

Thanks for an interesting comment, and working out those graphs.
Perhaps it is appropriate however to note a couple of reservations to the path you have plotted coming about.
Wind might really be thought of a bundle of different technologies at different stages of development.
What we have at the moment is an ancillary power source, which needs extensive back-up, usually although not always in the form of burning fossil fuels, often at lower efficiencies than could be obtained were wind not part of the mix.
It should also be noted that experience to date is mostly with on-shore wind, and that it makes no attempt to provide secure base-load capability, and that costs in recent years have escalated rather than followed a cost-reduction curve such as would normally be expected in an energy source which was going to continue to expand dramatically.
It should also be noted that to date the low rates of wind penetration are due solely to subsidies, and would be drastically lower were that to cease.Of course, coal in particular also gets a free ride in many respects due to it's externalisation of waste costs.
Furthermore, the exploitation of wind has very high costs in materials, steel and so on, far more than the alternatives.
In order for the increase you hypothesise to occur, a number of breakthroughs would be required, amounting effectively to a brand-new technology.
A massive grid would be required, together with some other means of providing back-up due to intermittency, as as your graphs clearly show the power generated from wind is projected to take off in excess of other sources just as natural gas and coal production plummet.
Presumably a lot of this is to come from off-shore wind in many area, as in many areas such as Europe there are not the places on land available. This is even more expensive, at the moment at least hugely so.
Solar is in many respects rather more favourably placed, since it would not in some guises use quite such vast resources as for wind, and costs, albeit with some hiccups mainly due to shortage of silicon, are sinking fairly well. Problems of intermittency and in particular lower incidence of sunshine in the winter (around 4 times lower even in areas like the Mohave), and problems of getting the power where it is needed via a super-grid or such also make this a very speculative power source.
It's an awful lot easier to generate those kinds of levels of power using nuclear power, and we know most of how to do it, although some further development is needed.
If nuclear if frowned upon, hot-rock geothermal has many advantages over wind or solar, as it would be comfortable producing base -load in most places, and does not vary winter or summer, or diurnally. Of course, this is a glimmer in the eye at the moment, rather than a developed technology, and the same applies to high altitude wind, although if that one works out it would probably be very cheap.
So thanks again for the work you have put into those graphs, which are very informative, and provide one of the most valuable educative resources one could have; the data from which others can draw their own conclusions, even should they perhaps differ radically from those who took the trouble to present them.
From the information you have given my own conclusion is that wind power, at least in the form of wind-turbines, are unlikely to continue to expand so rapidly for long, or provide a decisive amount of energy needed in the years up to the mid-century.

It seems to me that you are comparing scale rather than growth rates here. When I try to estimate the assumed growth rate it looks like it doubles in five years or about 15% annual growth. Thus current growth rates for wind (30%) and solar (50%) are quite a bit higher than this and look sustainable for at least the next 7 years or so.

It seems to me also that since this is really a technology replacement issue, you might want to look at the replacement of home ice delivery owing to post WWII conversion of industrial capacity to mass production of freon based refridgerators. This kind of example will give you a better sense of what industrialization can do in terms of shifting the character of markets. In that case, we were not running out of ice so the motivation would be a little less than in the case of replacing fossil fuels.

Chris

Your charts seems to indicate that by 2050 more than half of primary energy would come from wind. There is no precedent in the history for such a rapid increase. For U.S. the transition was as follows: coal moved from 1 per cent to 10 per cent in 25 years; oil went from 1 per cent to 10 per cent in 40 years; and natural gas went from 1 per cent to 10 per cent in 55 years. The average of these three is 40 years. Based on the historical record, we will get to perhaps 10-20 per cent by 2050. What do you think?

best, Seppo Korpela

This looks similar to the solar situation with world growth lagging US growth. Solar manufacturing grew by 50% worldwide but installations in the US grew by 84%. Clearing supply chain limitations would seem to be important for both industries or the US could induce a bidding war and we won't see the reduction in electricity prices that these industries promise as soon as we might otherwise.

Chris

I think that the plants that will face early closure will be those with the highest relative operating expense other than fuel. Gas plants will see less use, but they will actually last longer because of this. Coal sees some cost in shutting down and starting back up but saves a lot on fuel when shut down so it may also linger. Nuclear plants, especially those that have not yet repaid the cost of construction, have high overhead when they are not operating and restarts are also costly. These would seem to be most at risk for early closure. This is actually a good thing because we'll be able to shift the intellectual capacity currently being used there over to more productive pursuits with a higher energy payoff.

Chris

I think that depends on what the extra work hours replace. If they replace costly fuel and or waste product externalities, that is a good thing. But I agree that we have to be careful with the "creates local jobs" promotional theme. It is often used to obscure bad economics.

WNC: I had been thinking along similar lines. Trying to prepare people for a future with significant intermittancy of the power supply. The following story makes me think there could be a real game changer on the horizon:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7200052.stm

Basically Abu Dhabi plans a carbon free future, using the hydrogen in methane, and capturing and sequestering the carbon. Supposedly methane plus steam can produce hydrogen, and sequesterable CO2.

If indeed it is practical to remove the carbon from methane, and if it is indeed also possible to exploit the seabed methane hydrates, then we would have a very large carbon free FF energy source. I realize this is IF to the second power, but these potential developments could be revolutionary. The amount of methane hydrates available being several times greater than all the coal&oil combined.

People seem unaware that our power supply and demand is already intermittent, and engineers and managers are always having to get more supply from here, turn down supply from there, raise it from here to match a drop somewhere else, etc.

It's called a "grid" and entire continents are connected in this way.

We already have a grid which adjust to varying and only slightly-predictable supply and demand.

Anyone who imagines that the air will be still and the sky overcast in every part of an entire continent on any particular day ought to watch the weather report at the end of their national news with more attention.

If you have just one wind turbine or solar panel system feeding your town, then of course you're going to have troubles. What you need is all that to be connected in a national grid - exactly as we do now.