For an overview, look here.

http://www.vattenfall.de/cps/rde/xchg/trm_de/hs.xsl/151.htm

Interesting that, of the 9340 mW wind capacity installed today Vattenfall credits only 460 mW as dependable power. (See the referenced page for much more information.

The fully geeky can download excel spreadsheets with 15-minute wind infeed mW recorded since June of 2003:

http://www.vattenfall.de/cps/rde/xchg/trm_de/hs.xsl/150.htm

There are many numbers to crunch here for anyone interested in quantitative analysis of the behavior of a large wind system.

Pointers to wind data from the other German grid operators are here:

http://reisi.iset.uni-kassel.de/pls/w3reisiwebdad/www_reisi_page_new.show_page?page_nr=353

The other data is not so easily accessed as Vattenfall’s

I don’t have a problem with what the utility calls “retail wheeling.” Say they generate 90 percent of their power with “dirty coal” and 10 percent of their power with “clean wind.” Suppose 10 percent of their customers pay they extra tribute money MG&E is asking for wind power. Even though the electrons get mixed together over the same wires, I have no concern for the 10 percent festooning their cars with goofy bumper stickers saying how morally superior they are for using “clean wind power” and for the remaining 90 percent being aloof to their use of electricity from clubbed baby seal carcasses.

The problem I have is saying that one is “getting 100 percent of their power from clean, renewable sources.” Tim Metcalf, I am talking to you.

You see, if Metcalf’s Sentry Hilldale was really getting 100 percent of their power from wind, does that mean that they turn of their refrigerated food cases and back-room storage areas on an off as the weather changes? Or do they provide their own backup — they could, you know, if they were really earnest about it, perhaps making ice or dry ice during the time the wind blows and then running their equipment off the stored ice when the wind is calm. Do they do that? I don’t think so. They fall back upon on the electric power grid to run their freezers the 75 percent of the time the wind is not blowing.

What I am saying is that this is a free-market economics Web site, isn’t it? I think all of us could buy into the argument that 10 percent of customers are really getting their power from wind, that is if 80 percent of customers could decide to “subscribe” to the wind power program and if MG&E honestly got 80 percent of its power from wind, but they can’t do that now, can they, because the wind is not steady enough.

Again what I am saying, the 10 percent who are claiming to get “100 percent wind power” are free riders on the remaining 90 percent of generating capacity from “dirty” sources. So Mr. Metcalf, do you just let all the food in your freezers spoil when the wind doesn’t blow?

Wind power production is quite often very low during peak power consumption time periods.

Here is a link to some Bonneville Power Administration wind data and graphs. The top link on the page is a five minute real-time graph.

http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/Wind/default.aspx

Solar has achieved cost parity with coal in 2009 (no subsidy) and looks to get cheaper than cool soon.

It might have passed so meaningless cost per kilowatt threshold but a solar power based power system is still fantastically more expensive than coal. A system is what you need to provide power 24/7. A system powers critical facilities and functions. Solar power cannot do that. All calculations about the cost of solar power has to include the cost of the fossil fuel/nuclear sources that take up the slack with the solar power isn’t there.

If weather-dependent power was viable as a primary source of power, we should expect to see a lot of little communities or facilities running completely off weather-dependent power. That is how all previous real energy sources began. They provided power for some critical or out of the way that justified the expense and inconvenience of the new technology. Then they take over more and more from the old power source because they are less expensive and more reliable. Weather-dependent sources by contrast cannot provide power for anything larger than a flashlight and can only function with a complete non-weather dependent backup. That alone should tell us they are non-viable.

Alternative energy systems stop being an alternative and start being the next big thing when they are the cheapest available solution. We’re rapidly getting there. But even when we get there, the problem that these newly economic forms of energy do not operate 24×7 but depend on environmental conditions remains a problem, one we don’t have a solution for, yet.

When we do get that solution, which I predict will be prior to 2020, I expect that we are going to witness a real switchover. The actual greens will be happy while the luddites will find all sorts of new excuses why these formerly championed power sources are no longer ok.

When it comes to the ecological impact, one has to keep the effects of mining and drilling for fossil or nuclear fuels in mind.

When it comes to windpower one must keep in mind the ecological impact of mining for construction materials, the building of roads and other infrastructure to support a massively spread out power scavenging system as well as the constant need to constantly replace parts owing the relatively high wear on weather-dependent equipment and the fact that such equipment has relatively short operational lifespans. You also have to take in to account that weather-dependent power is much more expensive and thus that it raises the cost of adopting new ecologically friendly technologies.

(Actually the data contains an outlier with 45 $ at year 12 but year 11 and 13 are around 30 $)

That outlier is almost certainly the result of weather damage and thus not really an outlier at all but a predictable cost surge in any system exposed to the weather for a long enough time. For example, if we put wind farms on or off the eastern coast of the US it is a dead certainty that over a 20 year operational life every single turbine will be stuck by at least one hurricane or devastating north easterner. It’s like calculating the cost of maintenance of a house in a flood plain. You get long stretches with no unusual cost but you know for certain that eventually the house will suffer major damage.

Btw, a good source for numbers is http://www.nrel.gov.

I always guessed that they would be but was never able to track down maintenance costs. Do you have any figures?

For the real advocates of wind energy, here is the shocker. They are absolute maintenance nightmares. Because of the variation in the wind, there is correspondingly variation in the turbine gearbox and the drive shaft that turns the generator. Electric generation operates best when the turbine shaft can turn at a relatively constant speed. The wind turbines don’t rotate at a constant speed and the slowdown, speedup, slowdown, speedup chews up the gears. If you want a great investment, invest in the companies that maintain these behemoths.

Oh, and one note for the environmental wackos – all those turbines in Colorado: They are chewing up golden eagles like crazy. Thousands of golden eagles have been killed because they located these turbines in the area called Grasslands National Park which is thousands of acres of native grassland on the Colorado-Nebraska border. Grasslands National is the prime hunting and nesting area for the golden eagle.

Can we get the billboards back to cover up the windmills? BTW billboards are good for small business and good for economic growth.

As far as Germany, I find it HILARIOUS that the Germans would worry for one second about their fuel or money being withheld by a foreign country, since a huge percentage of their natural gas comes from a pipeline that the Russians usually hold hostage every year. They could have built more coal or nuclear plants to not be so dependent upon Russia but instead they use the quick n’ easy natural gas and a smattering of feel-good wind power and then wonder every year why they are dependent upon the most mercurial and dangerous large scale de-facto dictatorship in the world.

I’m not for or against wind, if it makes sense. Probably doesn’t make too much sense in Illinois given our likely low capacity factor. It could make a lot of sense elsewhere, or at least a bit of sense.

Capacity factors for wind farms in the US generally run in the range of 25% to 40%, with the highest values, not surprisingly, coming from Oklahoma and Nebraska. I found record of another wind farm in Illinois that has a capacity factory of about 25%.

These numbers are actually better than I would have expected. I’d be very interested to learn where in this range EcoEnergy expects their new site to perform. To bad they didn’t have the guts and honesty to publish those numbers along with their pseudo-data.

For comparison, total capacity factor for US nuclear plant was calculated at 92% in 2002. I didn’t find any more recent numbers than that.

The low maintenance/ fuel costs compared to other small scale power plants make wind power an extremely calculable investment.

Shannon Love wrote:

Obviously not. Otherwise, there would be no need for massive subsidies of weather-power.

The word C. Trapp used was calculable, not profitable and he/she/disembodied-brain-in-a-jar is absolutely correct about that. The output, over time, of a given wind power installation in a given site is very calculable, based on the wind patterns for that site.

The fact that EcoEnergy studiously avoids quoting those oh-so-calculable numbers suggest that they know we won’t like them. Instead they quote obviously irrelevant statistics like overall up-time and energy payback. Guess what, potato batteries have much better up-time and energy payback than wind farms. Maybe we should cover the Midwest with them instead?

Nuclear plants take several minutes (around 30) to regulate their power output.

Yes, but (1) at least nuclear power plants can increase their output at will. Wind and other weather based power sources cannot. If power needs go goes up suddenly, the nuclear plant just needs to turn up a dial to eventually compensate. Weather based power is almost always maxed out i.e. it is producing as much power at any given time as weather will allow. (2) Any technique that can be used to buffer weather-dependent power can be used even more efficiently to buffer the output of nuclear power plants.

I would also note that you are comparing hypothetical future technology that will give a boost to weather-dependent power but comparing that fantasy technology to real-world actually working nuclear power. How does weather-dependent power stack up against hypothetical future nuclear technology?

The low maintenance/ fuel costs compared to other small scale power plants make wind power an extremely calculable investment.

Obviously not. Otherwise, there would be no need for massive subsidies of weather-power. Weather-dependent power doesn’t save anyone money because it can never replace the capital investment needed in conventional sources to take up the slack when the weather turns bad. At best, it saves some fuel cost but the capital cost can easily offset that.