This is how the oil war ends. Not with a bang, but with a wind mill.

In my opinion, the line

The new wind projects completed in 2008 account for about 42% of the entire new power-producing capacity added in the US last year

is the most important. Of all new capacity that came online, 42% is wind. Of course, I don't know if that's nameplate or expected productivity, but cranking up the sum of wind, solar, and bio to 100% of additional capacity should be the intermediate goal.

Once we're meeting all of our new demand with green-e, then we can cry to start shutting down the old coal or oil fired power plants by replacing them with green-e. I know, it's not going to happen within a year or two, but I do believe that with enough gov't pressure (Fed RPS, for starters) that we could make it happen.

Of course, plug in vehicles would throw that for a major league loop.

The growth rate is impressive.

More important figures are the productivity trends at the newer sites. New equipment should be bringing reliability up and maintenance costs down.

It will become harder to find good land sites. Taller and taller towers will be needed. At sea the best offshore sites will occupied and then more expensive sites in deeper water farther away will be needed.

But for now good sites are available.

It looks like there will be a doubling of capacity by 2012. That should provide definitive data about whether wind will go above 5%. And, if so, how far.

By then we will also know more about alternatives to wind.

Unfortunately all is not as it seems. The UK utility that runs over 2000 windmills reports that actual electrical production from windmills deviates significantly from a "Name Plate" rated power generation.

Coal and Nuclear "utilization factor" is usually in the low 90+% range. That means that they are actually generating electricity 90+% of the time, as maintenance consumes less than 10% of the time.

However Wind Farms don't come near that utilization factor. Windmills produce electricity intermittently. The UK utility reports its actual "utilization factor" is UNDER 5% of the time, for wind. This is astounding, and almost unbelievable.

But on reflection, it becomes possible to understand. We know the wind doesn't always blow. But it can also blow either too hard, (greater than 23 mph), or too soft, (less than 8 mph). Seldom does the wind blow at the precise wind-speed that the windmill's rated out put is produced. When wind is outside the range, too hard or too soft, the windmills must be turned off or they will either tear off their propellers; or wipe their their thrust or load bearings. Increasingly they must be throttled, or the Grid instabilities and resonances, they create can cause instantaneous power surges and instantaneous large demands, creating Blackouts. The only known solution, endorsed by by both T Boone Pickens, the UK utility,and other Utilities, is too add lots of conventional power generation in a ratio of 4 to 1, and limit intermittent generation to less than 20% of active generation at any time, to damp out these resonances. Whwer esi that savings from windmills if you must build conventional power plants in addition?

Stuck up on a pole, high in the sky, in the elements, it is tough on the wind equipment, and both extra expensive, and time consuming to do repairs. Maintenance takes much longer. Lifetimes are meeting only one third expected lifetimes.

The net result of the UK's utility's actual 15 years experience with operating over 2000 windmills, is that they are producing at "Name Plate" rating just 3%, of the time!

So that "glorious" worldwide wind installation capacity figure of 120 Gigawatts may be theoretically true; but turns into a paltry 3-4 Gigawatts of electricity actually produced. (that is the output from ONLY three conventional powerplants)

There are genuine and valid engineering and economic reasons that wind and solar were not adopted long ago. It is no ta Conspiracy. The electricity produced is not economic at all. It is pure political pressure that makes anyone install these white elephants, as well as massive subsidies.

Consider: What would the consequences be on the adoption of electric vehicles, if the price to recharge the batteries was not 75 cents per gallon equivalent of gasoline? Rather the price was 10 times that at $7.50 per gallon equivalent, as you plugged it in, to recharge your battery?

Electric cars would simply die, other than HEVs, that rely on fossil, as they did in the EV-1 era as impractical toys. We would not get off the use of fossil fuels for Transport for a long time as Electricity would not be a now valid substitute.

You're full of sh&t as usual stan. In 30 sec. I find the following figures for 2005, 60Gw, 100Twh. That works out to a capacity factor of 0.20.
Therefore 160Gw works out to 30Gw at constant level. Do the World a big service and throw yourself into composting heap.

@Stan
I think what dursun is saying is that to be taken a serious contributor, and not a disingenuous time waster, on this site one should provide credible facts.

Starting with the very first line of your post
('The UK utility that runs over 2000 windmills (sic)'):
please name the UK utility that actually runs 2000 wind turbines.

Actualy folks both stan and you are right. Notice what he said.. it only produces at nameplate 3% of the time... In short they rarely ever got the full output. In the north seas they had expected far better then that.. remember the north seas are a maintenance nightmare that is offset or hoped to be offset by greater output.

The real problem is every windfarm is totaly different and to make matters worse as climate changes we cant be sure what the output of our wind farms will become. Also windfarms are VERY vulnerable to powerful storms wich are on the rise.
Some factors that make nuke very useful to utilities are..

1 It lasts 60 years.

2 its up about 95-98% if well designed and operated.

3 It can be counted on for baseline power its rated for.

4 Its cheap to run even if its not cheap to make.

5 You can foist alot of the upfront build cost onto the state and local govs via tax breaks.

Wind resources in the US are barely tapped and are of a higher quality than those in Germany and much of Europe. The DOE report on Wind 2007 put the capacity factor of the newer installations well in the 30's. A Hawaiian project get CF values well into the 40's.

The EIA 2005 energy report put the production cost of wind electricity around 0.98c/kWh in the US. This is way below the production cost of nuclear or coal which is presently 1.7-1.8c/kWh last time I checked. This is with the pre 2005 installations which have a slightly lower CF and thus higher costs than the newer US installations, which have higher CF values.

The wind installations saw a very slight increase in cost to $1700/kW installed from $1500 due to supply line shortages but considering the recent slowdown on orders, future projects will likely be cheaper. The advantage of course is that wind can take advantage of scales of mass production and even if orders didn't slow down, the industry predicted that the shortages would've been fixed by this year. Installed costs are way lower than nuclear, although this should be tempered with the lifespan of the installations. Of course no one knows exactly how much new nuclear will cost (some figures are astromonical - ie S&P estimates I think around $7000-8000/kW installed minimum).

Although variable, with a large robust grid, wind power can be used to displace large conventional generation and maybe even alleviate the need for baseload. It can't be done alone, though. Until pumped storage or compressed air energy storage (CAES)is used or something else is built, some form of conventional power will be needed to back up variability but those plants already exist and are used daily to deal with regular variability of normal use of the grid. That's why the grid exists, to leverage the different production characteristics to provide stable power at minimal costs.

The US figure alone, puts about the equivalent production of 2-3 new nuclear reactors onto the grid in one year. Not too shabby at all. The year before, the US installed even more than the last.

Yes I would rather have a nuclear plant than a coal plant but then given all of wind's attributes, I would rather have wind than nuclear if possible, and in many cases it is possible or at least in part. The best solution is to conserve as much to reduce new production needs.

Stan's rant as usual tries to obfuscate things.

The CF of wind is based on the size of the generator put into the turbine. You could put a smaller generator but in raising the CF, you would also get an increase in the cost of production of electricity, which is the important number. CF is intentionally used by critics to artificially create an illusion of inferiority where none exists.

The higher figures for wind's CF can be found in the DOE's numbers for wind in their 2007 wind power document and the wind 2030 document.

Variability is taken out of reasonable assements of what occurs in a grid situation. Baseload is what the general usage of clocks and refrigerators and everything else that runs 24/7, usually in the fall or spring so that seasonal variations don't get included. The rest is taken up by variable sources. When a reactor or coal baseload station goes down, the variable assets are use to compensate for the lost capacity. Wind can be used as a source of power in those situations and because of the low production cost would be the most profitable of already owned assets. The only caveat is that wind capital costs more make than gas and coal.

The so called cost of damping variability is in the wind 2030 document and is quite cheap and depends on the capital assets that a utility already has. At the 20% level, the additional costs have been estimated to be less than a cent per kwh. These intermmittancy costs exist with today's balance of assets and vary with the penetration of the technology. At less than a cent per kwh at the 20% level, these costs have been overstated by the critics.

With a larger, more robust grid, that cost would drop. In a jurisdiction that has a lot of hydro like Quebec or Washington, the price would also drop since cheap hydro matches very well with wind. Better wind forcasting techniques will also decrease costs as fewer conventional assets will be kept on standby.

The costs of the additional plants not there? Of course they are calculated. Stan just hasn't looked it up. The DOEs' documents clearly state them. Too bad Stan hasn't gotten off his high horse to actually look at them, especially since I've referenced them before.

Where water resources are hard to come by. Wind provides a way to produce huge amounts of power that use up virtually no water. This is important since water scarcity will increase in the future.

The lifetime of windmills is totally lowballed by Stan. There are plenty of facilites that are over 9 years old, still producing power. It should also be considered that the technology is improving.

Stan's Fact of windmills and solar requiring subsidies are the facts of one who is obssessed with thinking they are right without being right. Typical ideological ranting.

All technologies are subsidized in some fashion. A Duke energy executive stated that without government support, his company would not even consider nuclear. And Duke is one of the utilities that is on the cusp of the so called nuclear renaissance. Coal gets subsidies from technological developement to mining. When subsidies for wind end, wind developement get curtailed because upfront costs are larger for renewables, but the long term paybacks are much better for renewables and they have less undesirable impacts. But curtailed or not, some still get built. The worldview of small minded people will not stop those not chained to the preconceived quaint notions of the past. Keep thinking in the box Stan, because a box is where those ideas belong; that and soon to be buried six feet under.