The >3% for wind probably was based on spring winds when other generation would have been curtailed due to lower seasonal demand.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see coal come back up a bit in 2012 as our economy recovers and demand rises.

Coal fell 6% in 2011 to supply 42% of the grid supply, in december it supplied 39% of generated power, the first time below 40% since the 1970s.
Wind supplied 119,747 Gwh out of 4,105,734 or 2.9% of total generation.
Renewables as a whole produced 12.6% of total grid supply in 2011 an increase 21% of the previous year.

Those plants which are conforming to EPA regulations may have largely cleaned up their emissions. Not all plants have cleaned up and several will be closed.

But that’s just for the emissions which harm the health of those who breathe their smoke. We’ve got to shut down coal for their CO2 emissions as well.

” wind is an adjunct to a fully functioning conventional power system, not a replacement.”

That would be correct had you said “a component”. Wind, alone, would not give us the 24/365 grid we need. But it is almost certain to be a major player and a supplier of cheap electricity.

“Lastly, in comparing costs, the fully-loaded cost of land is never figured for wind power.”

A dumb argument. 98% of the land inside a wind farm is still available for original use. Farming, ranching or wildlife habitat continue on around the turbine footings.

If you knew about the economics of ranching or farming you would know that the 2% of land leased for turbine footings are major income sources for the farmer or rancher who has been making a much harder living from the other 98%.

The politics of wind has changed in very red states because wind is producing income for land owners, jobs and tax revenue for local and state governments. If wind was not paying its way you wouldn’t have Republican governors going to Washington to campaign for more support for wind.

First, while I run my own communications company, PJM is not my client and I have no interest in this report beyond it being good news for renewables and the climate. This is not a “PR piece” and I have a strict policy of not covering my clients.

Second, I disagree with the assertion that renewables can’t supply more than 20 percent of a grid’s electricity without blackouts. This has happened several times in recent months, most notably in Texas and California. Multiple grid operators, notably PJM, are investing in advanced power management technology that allows them to balance intermittency. In addition, energy storage and concentrating solar power are slowly bringing renewables to baseload capacity. It’s not going to happen overnight – but it is happening.

Third, coal is becoming more expensive across the US electricity sector, especially in market auctions like PJM where the price of power is bid in by generators. Multiple government and policy reports have found this trend. Simple economics are at play here – power producers tell the market operator at what price they can generate power, and the market accepts their bids from lowest to highest. As coal gets more expensive due to previously unaccounted-for externalities, it bumps down in the stack of accepted bids. Right now, nuclear and natural gas are the most direct beneficiaries. But as renewables come down in price, especially solar, they move up in the stack of accepted bids. Again, this is not going to happen overnight – but it is happening and that trend is shown by the amount of generation added in 2011.

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/

You can get the quarterly numbers from the EIA site.

As for the article – if you distrust the numbers then why not take that up with PJM Interconnection.

You could start by reading their report – it’s linked.

“In 2009, the Institute for Energy Research commissioned the Danish think-tank CEPOS (Centre for Political Studies) to report on electricity exports from Denmark and the economic impact of the Danish wind industry. This report[27] states that Danes pay the highest residential electricity rates in the European Union (partly to subsidize wind power), and that the cost of saving a ton of carbon dioxide between 2001 and 2008 has averaged 647 DKK (€ 87, US$ 124). It also estimated that 90% of wind industry jobs were transferred from other technology industries, and states that as a result Danish GDP is 1.8 billion DKK (US$ 270 million) lower than it would have been without wind industry subsidies.

The report was later heavily criticised. Firstly Danish paper Ingeniøren claimed that the report was ordered and paid for by the American oil and coal lobby.

Later, several Danish researchers and professors from all technical universities in Denmark, wrote a joint response to the report, refuting it[28].

The report from CEPOS was even brought to Government level, where minister of Climate and Energy Lykke Friis discredited the work done by CEPOS and the report[29].”

Wiki…

and…

“The cost of electricity in Denmark is high, but this is a result of tax policy, not wind. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s official statistics agency, the pre-tax price of electricity for an average medium household in Denmark is 120€ per MWh, which is virtually equivalent to the European average of 119€ per MWh. The pre-tax price of electricity in Denmark is actually 23 percent lower than Ireland as well as significantly lower than the United Kingdom (by 14 percent) and Germany (by 7 percent). After taxes are taken into account, the price comparison is slightly different: the electricity tax in Denmark means the net price of electricity is higher than the European average. But as the CEPOS study points out, this is a function of Danish policies, not a result of wind deployment.”

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ssuccar/the_danish_wind_experience_tru.html

Second, the fact that Danes buy and sell power depending on the wind proves the point: wind is an adjunct to a fully functioning conventional power system, not a replacement. England and Germany have discovered that they have to keep full-capacity conventional power in spinning reserve.

Lastly, in comparing costs, the fully-loaded cost of land is never figured for wind power. Sure, you can get enough land for a 100 MW wind operation at reasonable prices. But try finding 200 square miles of land for a wind farm to replace a sizable conventional power plant. Now the cost of land skyrockets. Again, wind makes sense as an adjunct, not a replacement.

Now try to make the argument that the time is now to start shutting down conventional plants, because wind and solar is ready for prime time. Because that is precisely what the Greens are doing, and it will not end well for us.

But good luck here on earth when your energy bills go up and we still emit as much carbon dioxide as ever. That’s what Denmark’s experience has been.

Wind provided 2.1% of the 2010 total. In 2011 wind apparently exceeded 3% of the total supply. The 2011 numbers have not yet been released, except for quarterly summaries which indicate that >3% was likely achieved.

In 2011 coal produced 39% of our electricity. That’s a bit below “almost half”.

Accuracy please….

Yes, the Danes buy power from their neighbors when the wind isn’t blowing. Their neighbors have other ways to generate power. But – their neighbors buy power from the Danes when cheap wind power is available.

Coal causes no health risks? Do you really want to go out in public saying stuff like that?

Both wind and solar are cheaper than new nuclear and new coal. It’s intellectually dishonest to compare the cost of new generation with generation built and paid off decades ago.

And, if you do honest accounting, new wind is cheaper than old, paid off coal. Solar is no more, probably less.

I’d suggest that you are blinded by coal smoke….

The author notes that coal costs are rising, without mentioning that Obama is deliberately pursuing that goal to advance his green agenda. The new EPA regulations have no basis in health risks; they are intended to bankrupt coal plants.

You can’t change the physics of the thing. Wind and solar are inconstant sources that cost a lot more than coal or nuclear power. There are times when they produce no power at all. They consume huge land spaces, which are not available near large cities, where demand is highest.

Wind and solar may contribute some to the grid, but they will never be the foundation of any industrial society.

In 2010 nuclear provided 19.6%. (I don’t have the 2011 numbers yet.)

Together, that’s about 60% from coal and nuclear, not 80%.

We apparently could cut coal to zero and nuclear to 7.5%, getting 70% from non-hydro renewables, 15% from natural gas, and 7.5% from hydro.

…

(Dr. Alexander MacDonald, Director of the Earth System Research Lab at the) U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was in Vancouver on Friday for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual convention and mentioned in a talk there that clean, renewable energy (not even including hydroelectric) could cheaply supply 48 states of the continental U.S. with 70% of its electricity demand by 2030. The other 30% would be half from fossil fuels and half from nuclear and hydro.

“NOAA embarked on the renewables project three years ago, collating 16 billion pieces of weather data derived from satellite observations and airplane observations and weather station reports,” Scott Simpson of the Vancouver Sun writes.

“Then it designed a program to filter the information to remove unlikely venues for wind or solar power arrays – such as national parks and urban areas – and came up with a map showing robust wind resources in the middle of the continent and decent ones in the northeast Atlantic states, as well as strong solar production areas in the desert southwest.”

But here’s where the NOAA researchers stepped beyond the good to the great, research-wise: they balanced potential power production and electricity demand to determine, how, where, when, and to what extent clean energy could produce the electricity we need. The end result — 70% of electricity demand….”

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/02/20/clean-energy- could-supply-u-s-with-70-of-electricity-by-2030-no aa-director-says/

When the price of storage drops we can replace the natural gas and nuclear with less expensive stored renewable power.

We’ve already got the nuclear and hydro. As the nuclear plants wear out we can replace them with storage.