"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Up till recently I was of the opinion that thiugh i didn;t lIKE
windmills, like foregoing a 6 liter V8, or taking frequent holidays in
te south sea, it was probably part of the price one had to pay for the
Greater Good..until certain people started shoving windmills down our
throats and procalaimming them as the One True Solution to carbon free
energy.

So as you know, along with all the other greenwash, I decided to take a
look. The initial thrust was to simply see what energy policy was
feasible for a carbon neutral UK.

The answer was ultimately that as far as I could see, there was only one
practical option. Nuclear power and electric transport.

However the windmillers started to scream and create and say that
windpower could in fact do the job.

And for very sceptical report there are ten glowing 'windpower is the
answerer' articles on the net..so I looked deeper.


The more I looked the more deeply sceptical I became.

The negative issues surrounding wind power were simply not addressed by
its proponents.

This article contains a good summary

http://www.turbineaction.co.uk/wind-turbine-facts.htm

essentially blowing the gaff on the hidden costs associated with large
scale introduction of wind power.

Not to mention the rank subsidies

"According to Ofgem, the Labour government's wind subsidies
currently stand at £485 million a year."

"Wind farms get around three times as much in subsidy - a
mixture of selling ROCS [renewable obligation certificates] and a share
of fines paid by non-renewable plants - as they do from selling
electricity"

A rather more scholarly and dry critique is he-

http://www.oxfordenergy.org/pdfs/comment_0605.pdf

and as far back as 20004

http://www.windaction.org/documents/225

A totally unexpected downside comes from he-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3300814.ece

You may THINK that its unlikely the Iranians or the Russians would come
in low across the North sea, or up the thames estuary.. but a hijacked
airliner? no problem.

It seems that pretty competent people are starting to cry out against
this monumental waste of taxpayers money

http://www.glassclash.info/pdfs/Telegraph050326.pdf

But leaving that aside, and leaving the fact that the power actually
generated by windmills is estimated to be (at the point of generation)
somewhere between 20% and 400% of the cost by any other means (including
carbon free nuclear) the real downsides only become apparent at high
levels of wind farm generation..typically more than 20% of total capacity.

This is because windfarms don't operate at full capacity. Indeed at
windspeeds below 9mph, they don't operate at all, nor can they be used
at over 55mph. They disintegrate if not shut down.

So although the AVERAGE load capacity - the AVERAGE output with respect
to the peak is somewhere around 35%, for a significant proportion of the
time any given windfarm is not producing anything at all. Possibly up to
15% of the time.

The windfarm proponents will counter this by saying that that is fine,
because when its flat calm in Feltham, its a gale in Galashiels..


And skip the most fundamental points: that a gale in Galashiels is all
very well, but the power needs to get down to Feltham. This means some
pretty hefty upgrades to the Grid..at somebody else's costs. Because the
grid is required to take their energy, whether they want it or not.

As wind power gets an even higher proportion of the total it gets even
worse. Even if on a calm cold winter's - or a blazingly hot summer's -
day some power IS being produced somewhere, and even if its coming down
a massive supergrid from Orkney..it still wont be enough..unless the
total generating capacity is so over specified that in order to cover
the shortfalls of calm weather, it has to be overspecified by a factor
of many times. Probably around 6:1. So instead of your windfarm load
factor being a nice 35%, in reality it has to be operated much lower
than that - say 16% or so, OR you have to back it up with conventional
gas turbines, run at disadvantageous cycling, and efficiencies.

So not only does the wind power suddenly double in actual costs, since
as it reaches a high proportion of grid capacity it has to be operated
at a lower factor, it also needs far more infrastructure to transport
the energy from where the wind blows (typically scotland) to where its
needed (typically the south east). OR it has to be backed up with a huge
amount of conventional and fast cycling capacity, which probably menas
that in the end the carbon gains are negligible: Certainly this seems to
be the Danish and German experiences.


I can only conclude that, like so much else in the climate change lobby,
the whole thing is driven by politics. Nuclear energy is never
considered 'renewable' and huge subsidies are given to 'renewable' to
meet self imposed targets..and the only 'renewable' source that is
remotely feasible is wind, so we have wind.

The fact that at a national level it probably does nothing for fossil
fuel consumption at all, looks ugly, is bloody expensive, and reduces
the value of local houses to nil,. is never mentioned..

We seem to be, essentially, paying taxes - or higher electricity bills -
in order to meet paper targets that don't and wont affect CO2 production
at all!

Sigh. Just like every other climate change initiative the governments of
Europe have come up with in fact.

Nice post.

Backup generation via gas-turbines works: the carbon footprint is low
because they only run when there is not enough/too much wind.

This is probably cheaper than building 3x as many windmills. Since they run
so little, one can possibly do without the steam generation part and run
them at lower thermal efficiency. You have to pay for the capital cost of
the plant of course - but the combination looks quite good to me (maybe not
compared to nuclear or maybe nearly as good?). Arguably cheaper than
coal+sequestration?