The wind power delusion

[klondike]

Matt Ridley has written an excellent article in this week's Spectator about the bizarre rebellion within the Conservative Parliamentary Party whereby various prominent MPs, including Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Michael Gove, are demanding an end to the ban on on-shore wind farms on the grounds that it is a reliable source of sustainable energy that is cheap and getting cheaper. This is particularly urgent, the rebels argue, given the impact of the war in Ukraine on gas prices.

Why is the rebellion bizarre? Let Matt count the ways.

There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In fact, relying on the wind for power would guarantee that electricity is expensive for ever, because wind's unreliability poisons the market, driving up the price of gas-fired power too.

This week the prices offered to anybody – anybody! – who could guarantee to supply power on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November shot up briefly to about £1,100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), more than ten times the normal rate. Demand was forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr Micawber: result, misery. At such a price, enough supply did indeed come out of the woodwork, but not from the wind industry, which can't just turn on the wind when it wants. Growing reliance on unreliable wind has left Britain paying sky-high prices on still, cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the cameras while blowing up old coal power stations? They would be handy this winter.

The Ukraine war has driven gas prices higher, but, says Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch, it would be daft to assume that this is a permanent state of affairs and design a policy on the assumption that wind will be cheaper than gas in the future.

Claims that onshore wind is cheap come thick and fast from politicians in thrall to the most well oiled of crony-capitalist industries, the wind merchants. The claims are not supported by the accounts of onshore wind farms, which indicate a breakeven cost of around £80/MWh for the very cheapest farms. And this, note, is for the efficient wind farms with 200-metre turbines (twice the typical height), located in the windiest sites and spaced at least 1,200 metres apart so they don't they steal each other's wind. The cost estimate doesn't even count the need to carefully manage backup power generation for those times and places where the wind is not blowing hard enough, or blowing too hard. Nor does it count the cost of building and running transmission lines from remote wind farms to places where people actually live.

Wind farm accounts also show that this cost is rising, not falling, presumably due to such grid constraints, the fact that the best sites have gone, and the rising costs of steel, concrete, copper and neodymium making new machines pricier. Yet even £80/MWh is nearly double the cost of gas-fired power at the long-term average price of gas.

But that is if gas is allowed to supply electricity continuously without much interruption. If you keep telling gas power stations to switch off because the wind is blowing, as we do, then they will have to (and do) charge more to cover the inefficiency of heating up and cooling down the gas turbines. The more wind we add, the higher the price of gas-fired power. In this way, wind locks in high electricity prices, hastening the deindustrialisation of Britain, or what's left of it.

Full story

[Ashy]

This is becoming a situation where you either believe or you don't. I must admit I was under the impression that gas fired power stations used steam turbines and they have to keep the boilers hot. There are some local power stations that burn used cooking oil in marine engines but their capacity is small and is mostly used for a particular scheme.

[klondike]

From the grid watch page

CCGT: Combined Cycle Gas Turbines are gas turbines whose hot exhausts are used to drive a boiler and steam turbine. This two stage process makes them very efficient in gas usage. They are also quite fast to get online - less than an hour in general, so they are used to cover (profitable) peak demand and to balance wind output.

Obviously energy is used to warm them up and during that time there is no electricity produced

[Ashy]

Thanks that's cleared that one up.

Now it's brass monkey weather again and the wind is dropping. Because of government policy we are more and more dependent on gas. If we thought we  could run on wind and sunshine we have to think again. Although there are several practical ways of storing energy, many people believe that we could build a chemical battery to cover calm nights. Apparently the largest battery in the world is in Australia and holds enough charge for the relatively small scheme there for 3 hours.

No matter how electricity is stored it first has to be generated.

[klondike]

No need to worry about power. Rishi has authorised more of them to be built onshore. They mentioned there was low hanging fruit of sites that will generate 2.65GW (iirc).

Contracts are of course sweetened by still paying the owners when either the wind doesn't blow so they produce nothing or when their surplus can't be used so they get shut down.

The numbers suggest we have maybe 45GW peak demand and 35% of that or 15GW wind capacity at full tilt. The other day wind was providing less than 1% of demand. Perhaps the new onshore turbines mean we will be able to get a full 1% of demand when the wind don't blow. Reassuring.

[Ashy]

Not sure what the word for this type of policy is, but here is an extremely expensive machine which clearly isn't fit for purpose, so not only do we keep the ones we already have but build more. maybe it is a sign of madness.

[Michael Rolls]

it's called 'there's no good reason, it's just our policy'

[Diasi]

The a big overlooked problem with wind turbines is they have to be shut down when it's too windy, so combined with low / no wind speed the availability of wind turbines to actually generate electricity is very limited.  

[klondike]

The other amusing garbage they trot out is that it gets cheaper all the time to produce wind energy. Maybe it does but the buyers (us) don't benefit as the price they contractually charge is based on the market price of gas.

This is all one huge con designed to enrich the companies that run the bloody things. I'm unsure why the greenies are so keen on them considering they chomp up bats and birds of prey by the thousand.

[Ashy]

I've just checked and as it's a rather cold dull calm day, wind farms are providing 2% and solar farms are providing another 2% of demand, which is understandably quite high for a Sunday but the peak demand usually comes around 6 pm after the sun has long gone down.

[Ashy]

And now that the sun has gone down demand has reached almost 44GW and the windmills are hardly making 1%. They are quite likely to freeze up if they stand still now.

[klondike]

All we need is 100 times the number. Well until the delivered power drops further I guess. Perhaps we could set up a load of diesel engines with propellers to boost the wind...

[Ashy]

That sounds like a plan. In this cold weather the windmills will need heating. Can they generate enough power to keep themselves warm, i wonder.

[klondike]

We could do that by burning oil in big barrels. Like they did to disperse fog in WW2

[Michael Rolls]

dead calm, minus 8C forecast for this evening - Before it got dark I could see the windmills on the hills a few miles away - absolutely stationary