Fox Wind Power Fact Check

October 14th, 2012 by Nicholas Brown

I saw a video on Fox Business this morning about the Mid-Atlantic wind farm proposal, and the correspondents in the video made some controversial claims, so I decided to do a wind power fact check:

1. Wind power CAN provide constant and reliable power. The first dubious claim made in the video was that wind power is “incurably intermittent.” This isn’t true, because wind farms can provide a 100% stable power output using battery energy storage, compressed air energy storage, or pumped hydroelectric storage. They can even use a relatively small buffer energy storage system to back them up for 15 minutes while peaking natural gas power plants start to back them up.

So, wind power intermittency is certainly curable, but what matters is that it is cured in the most economic way possible. I should also add that modern combined-cycle natural gas power plants, which are not only very efficient (up to 60%), but also economical, are capable of adjusting their power production in as little as a minute, which is substantially helpful in backing up wind farms when wind speeds slow down.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the wind is always blowing somewhere. With a good grid, wind from one region can easily be sent to another.

Lastly, on this point, it’s important to point out that wind power is one part of the electric grid. It is not expected and will never be expected to deliver 100% of the grid’s electricity. When the wind is blowing, it is the cheapest form of electricity in many places, so whenever it is available, it has clear economic priority.

Wind power is useful. It can be stored. And it is one (very cheap) part of a broader energy mix.

Middelgrunden Offshore Wind Farm

2. The wind industry “only” hired 75,000 people. This may be true, but another way to look at that is that, while wind power doesn’t even account for 2% of nationwide electricity production, it has already generated 75,000 jobs. If that market penetration figure was increased from 2% to 50%, that could translate to many more jobs. A couple million jobs generated by wind farms, which do not import fuel from overseas, would be nice, wouldn’t it? And 75,000 is certainly nothing to scoff at, either. There are only 83,000 jobs in the US coal mining industry, and that industry provides 35-40% of US electricity. There are fewer than 48,000 jobs in the “Water, Sewer, and Other Services” industry — that’s quite a bit less than wind power’s 75,000.

3. Wind power is as eco-friendly as electricity generation gets. The claim that nuclear is “far more environmentally friendly” than wind power is absurd. What do you think — is radioactive nuclear waste less harmful than wind turbines that emit no pollutants into the atmosphere or water (read about acid rain) and don’t create waste that needs to be stored for millennia?

Wind turbines require a very small amount of space on the ground (~13 feet per turbine). The space around wind turbines can usually be used for agriculture. In fact, studies have found that it improves the yields of some crops.

Photo Credit: Kim Hansen from Wikimedia Commons.

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Tags: renewable energy Fox News, wind energy Fox, wind energy Fox Business, Wind Energy Jobs, wind energy united states, wind jobs, wind power Fox News

About the Author

Nicholas Brown writes on CleanTechnica, Gas2, Kleef&Co, and Green Building Elements. He has a keen interest in physics-intensive topics such as electricity generation, refrigeration and air conditioning technology, energy storage, and geography. His website is: Kompulsa.com.

saveenergy

Nicholas

You say – “Additionally, it’s
worth noting that the wind is always blowing somewhere. With a good grid, wind
from one region can easily be sent to another.”

Not so,
at the moment the whole of Western Europe
is under the same weather system, very little wind power over 1000s of miles, it’s
been like this for 18 days, it is a frequent situation.

My local windfarm Llyn Alaw has a capacity factor of only
7.2% this mth !!!

If you want to get the true picture of the poor performance of
European wind, look on this German wind energy company’s production data site, (100s
of locations with 1000s of turbines !!) http://www.rwe.com/web/cms/en/206488/rwe-innogy/sites/production-data-live/rwe-renewable-energy-live/ note; [It’s a manual refresh] – nb capacity in MW but output in kW

You also say – “Wind power
is useful. It can be stored. And it is one (very cheap) part of a broader
energy mix.”

You can only store small amounts of energy & to do it is
both inefficient & eye wateringly expensive.

E.g.;

battery. ≈ 85% Efficiency cost = 31-43 €-cent/kWh Dangerous, prone to fire

CAES ≈ 50% Efficiency cost = 13-27 €-cent/kWh

Flywheel, ≈ 90% Efficiency
cost = 300-500 €-cent/kWh

Hydrogen, ≈ 40% Efficiency
cost = 19-50 €-cent/kWh

Methane ≈ 30% Efficiency cost = 12-34 €-cent/kWh

ANNE

My favorite image is from Oxford University:
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html

It shows the real time generation of electricity in Britain
and how wind affects the other generators. The site refreshes automatically,
gives 7mths history. In ½hr slots.

(you can switch the different fuels on/off & zoom, –
follow the onscreen instructions)

Note how inefficient pumped storage is (bottom blue line)

STEFANO99

You say- “For how renewables work in the real world, all you
need to do is look at Germany
and their success. Can’t hide facts as big as Germany’s,
no matter how hard you try with BS.”

I agree, you can’t hide the facts, Germany
& Denmark
are now building brown coal plants because the wind & solar are unreliable
& intermittent.

http://fossilfuel.energy-business-review.com/news/vattenfall-unit-starts-up-brown-coal-fired-power-plant-in-germany-151012

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html
- Asteroid Miner
  
  I agree with saveenergy. Renewables are nothing more than an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. There is still only one way to get electricity without CO2, and that way is nuclear. The only problem with nuclear is that there are people who fear it because they don’t understand it. The solution is education. Nuclear is already the safest source of energy there is. See clearnuclear.blogspot.com
  - Scott
    
    Hooray for Lying! Hey everyone, lets pretend like the following doesn’t exist: PV/ CSP technology, dynamos, piezoelectric devices, storage devices, steam turbines, etc…
- Bob_Wallace
  
  There’s an edit function. There’s no reason to leave such a hard to read comment.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  Some points:
  
  There is no reason why “western Europe” should be an isolated grid. Europe is building toward a grid that reaches from Iceland to North Africa. The wind will be blowing somewhere, hydro flowing, ….
  
  There are at least four very promising new battery technologies which have proven themselves at the prototype level and two are going into production in the next few months. If only one proves out we will have cheap, safe, abundant storage.
  
  Germany’s new coal burning plants are replacing (not adding to) the older plants that either have been or will soon be decommissioned. Moreover, by 2020, 18.5 gigawatts of coal power capacity will be decommissioned, whereas only 11.3 gigawatts will be newly installed.
  
  Furthermore those plants will be more efficient, releasing less CO2 per unit electricity produced than are the ones they are replacing.
- MattyBumpo
  
  I’m not sure how you read the chart as showing pumped storage as inefficient. Pumped storage is 80% efficient, which is quite good by storage standards and easily made up for by the speed and range of both absorbing and discharging power to the grid.
StefanoR99

These guys can bash renewables until they are blue in the face with their made up facts.

For how renewables work in the real world, all you need to do is look at Germany and their success. Can’t hide facts as big as Germany’s, no matter how hard you try with BS.
globi

Storage is unnecessary and useless. The US already has over 500 GW of flexible capacity (mostly gas and hydro) to deal with variable demand: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/capacity/
and to back-up conventional power plants which can sometimes fail unexpectedly: http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/national/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-shut-down-unexpectedly-thursday Thousands of renewable power plants (on comparable GW scale) never fail unexpectedly. Wind- and photovoltaic-power simply reduce gas and water consumption of existing gas and hydro power plants.
Renewable power plants deliver power all the time: Wind and photovoltaic power plants in Germany still produced over 50% of their average weekly energy production even in their worst production week: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2012.pdf
In addition, it simply makes much more sense to electrify the fossil fuel heating sector with heat pumps and save fossil fuels than to invest in any storage systems and artificially produce hydrogen or methane or what not.
- MattyBumpo
  
  Wind + pumped storage, where the pumped storage sites are cost-effective ones, provides superior economic and environmental returns to a utility than the wind+gas combination.
Anne

“They
can even use a relatively small buffer energy storage system to back
them up for 15 minutes while peaking natural gas power plants start to
back them up.”

This is inaccurate and persists the notion that wind energy is on/off (‘intermittent’). It is not, it is a variable resource. Over the size of an average control area, wind power rises and drops slowly, giving power companies time to bring backup units on or off line. And it gets even better: wind energy is predictable, so they can schedule in advance.

My favourite image is: https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html

It shows the real time generation of electricity in Spain and how wind affects the other generators. You can clearly see that wind only increases and diminishes in strength on a timescale of hours, not 15 minutes.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  Some wind farms are installing “15 minutes” of storage in order to allow them to sell blocks of power to utilities and avoid having to purchase expensive power to fulfill their contracts if the wind slows.
  
  It’s a difference between utility-owned wind farms and wind farms selling their power to the grid.
- tibi stibi
  
  that IS a really cool image, it shows that the changes in power output are on all levels for all energy sources.
  i would like to have to raw data so i could calculate what the difference of each energy source is.
http://yrihf.com John Bailo

Follow Germany’s lead and couple renewable production with hydrogen storage for fuel cells.