What is so great about wind power?

[NBAfan]

I found this paper about wind power. I can't really copy and paste it here because it's 30 pages.
Here's a summary

Wind power is so dilute that to collect a significant quantity of wind energy will always require thousands of gigantic towers each with a massive concrete base and a network of interconnecting heavy duty roads and transmission lines. It has a huge land footprint.

Then the operating characteristics of turbine and generator mean that only a small part of the wind’s energy can be captured.

Finally, when they go into production, wind turbines slice up bats and eagles, disturb neighbors, reduce property values and start bushfires.

Wind power is intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict. To cover the total loss of power when the wind drops or blows too hard, every wind farm needs a conventional back-up power station (commonly gas-fired) with capacity of twice the design capacity of the wind farm to even out the sudden fluctuations in the electricity grid. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

The wind is free but wind power is far from it. Its cost is far above all conventional methods of
generating electricity. Either taxpayers or consumers will pay this bill.

Why exactly do we need more wind farms? The environment is ruined just to build them.

 

[amadeus]

You don't have to replace them every fifty years.

 

[Leonel]

There will still be wind millions of years from now.

 

[Ajidica]

Why exactly do we need more wind farms? The environment is ruined just to build them.

Please don't quote from the Daily Fail.

Anyhow, wind power works well for two main reasons.
1. It is renewable.
2. With minor repair work and maintnence, it is virtualy costless after the initial installation. When I was in California a few years ago, I saw a couple wind turbine running in a wind farm that had been there since the 60's.

 

[MobBoss]

It blows.

 

[Fetus4188]

I live near those California wind farms. They generate very little power, kill a ton of birds, and are generally an eyesore on otherwise beautiful hills.

IMO wind and solar have a future not in farms but in micro residential and commercial use. Throw one up on your roof, multiply by a 100000 buildings and you have a nice supplemental power source without any extra ground footprint. Anything but nuclear as a long term core energy policy is a pipe dream.

 

[cardgame]

Solar isn't necessarily a pipe dream.

 

[Arwon]

Inaccurate and misleading claims abound. Permit me to correct:

Wind power is so dilute that to collect a significant quantity of wind energy will always require thousands of gigantic towers each with a massive concrete base and a network of interconnecting heavy duty roads and transmission lines. It has a huge land footprint.

That's a lot of emotive adjectives intended to make an aesthetic argument that windmills are ugly. That's a personal judgement, I find them quite aesthetically pleasing.

And it's as well misleading. Firstly, everything needs transmission lines, that's how you get power from a generation site to urban distribution networks. And the land impact isn't really that great. For example, to replace a 1000MW coal power plant, outputting at an average of about 850MW or 7500 gWh, you would need about 2600 MW of wind power - so, say, 1300 turbines, across several sites.

That can be done on less than 20 square kilometres of land, depending on the sites, with farming continuing underneath the turbines. And in exchange for that, you're giving up the need to mine an equivalent amount of coal, forging the pollution impacts of the mining and burning on surrounding areas. An open cut coal mine and power generating plant can cover more than 50 square km.

Wind power is intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict. To cover the total loss of power when the wind drops or blows too hard, every wind farm needs a conventional back-up power station (commonly gas-fired) with capacity of twice the design capacity of the wind farm to even out the sudden fluctuations in the electricity grid. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

That's only semi-true. Wind power is intermittent, but it averages out and is more consistent across large areas, which is why wind farms cover several sites. An individual turbine is intermittent, but a dozen sites spread out over hundreds of kilometres is far far easier to predict

The claim that variance leads to instability is false. Modern electricity networks are already accustomed to dealing with two kinds of variance - variance of demand, and variance of supply - and is capable of balancing them out so that there is always sufficient energy to meet the load at that time. Managing a third type of variance from wind farms and solar thermal plants is really a trivial task for a modern electricity grid administrator.

In fact, coal power is actually hugely inefficient because it can't be shut down in less than half a day. That means it has to keep burning 24 hours a day, wasting any electricity which isn't needed. That inflexibility isn't necessary to running an electricity grid, it's just a design flaw in large fossil fuel power plants.

And yes, gas-fired peaking power is a necessary backup, but it only is needed occasionally, and the reason it's needed is to match the reliability of fossil fuel power plants (whilst maintaining the flexibility that they lack).

Finally, wind needn't be employed in isolation. Any energy grid needs a mix of baseload, intemrediate and peaking power. At present we generally use coal or nuclear as baseload, coal/gas/oil as intermediate load, and gas for peaking power. That's not the only possible set-up, though. Wind can function as baseload and intermittent power, with gas fired turbines as peaking power. PV, though expensive, has a useage profile (ie, during the day) that makes it a natural substitute for intermediate power sources, and solar thermal concentration can be as reliable as baseload coal. This is all technically possible now, it's just a matter of getting the investment and overcoming vested interests in the existing grid structure.

 

[Quackers]

http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf

Read the executive summary.

Don't vote green anywhere.

 

[NovaKart]

If you think wind power isn't sufficient you can always try to help it out by farting more.

 

[Cutlass]

OP is quoting a disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, I like them because they're a decently reasonable cost for their energy output, they've fixed footprints. They're a source of alternate income for farmers and people with wide land spaces. They slow the rate at which we need to bring expensive alternates online.

If the marginal costs get too high (say, with the rare earths issue), then we can not produce as many. But I think we, as a society, want a plethora of energy sources.

And it strikes me that arguments that claim that we're actually much more addicted to coal and oil than the 'greenies' suspect, are arguments that we should be working even hard on alternative solutions. Because the marginal cost of coal and oil look like they're going up

 

[useless]

Wind power didn't create Chernobyl

 

[Jan H]

it's great because it pays my paycheck
I work for a company that produces gearboxes for some of the mayor turbine manufacturers (Vestas, Siemens, Gamesa, Suzlon, rePower, Sinovel, ...)

 

[Silurian]

Most people want to reduce their countries dependance on middle east oil.
They do not want to strip mine for coal.
Nuclear is expensive to build and even more expensive to dismantle.

 

[Ajidica]

Wind power didn't create Chernobyl

Correct. Russian incompetance in design and operation of Chernobyl created that disaster.

 

[Yeekim]

I live near those California wind farms. They generate very little power, kill a ton of birds, and are generally an eyesore on otherwise beautiful hills.

IMO wind and solar have a future not in farms but in micro residential and commercial use. Throw one up on your roof, multiply by a 100000 buildings and you have a nice supplemental power source without any extra ground footprint. Anything but nuclear as a long term core energy policy is a pipe dream.

This.
However, I remember reading something about the Age of Sail making a hopeful comeback. If we could reinvent sea transport without fossil fuels, that would be incredibly cool!
EDIT: Found an article on that:
http://www.maplesoft.com/company/publications/articles/view.aspx?SID=371

SkySails’ first cargo ship, with a huge computer-controlled kite, was flagged off in December 2007 by Eva Luise Koehler, wife of German President Horst Koehler. The ship MV "Beluga SkySails" started its maiden voyage from the city of Bremerhaven, Germany to South & North America (and back) and the SkySails-System with its 1,722 square-foot towing kite has been put into operation successfully. This new technology can tow cargo vessels and superyachts, reducing fuel consumption by 10 to 35% on annual average . SkySails used Maple symbolic mathematical software for engineers to develop its simulation devices.

Well, 10%-35% doesn't sound too impressive, but still substantial.
EDIT 2: From website:

Under optimal wind conditions, fuel consumption can temporarily be cut by up to 50%.

 

[amadeus]

Wind power didn't create Chernobyl

Right. Marxism did.

 

[cardgame]

Right. Marxism did.

You can't explain that!

 

[Ajidica]

Right. Marxism Incompetance did.

Fixed for you.