Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Wind turbine marketers are full of hot air
If this article's information is correct, the general public is being misinformed and led down a false path.
That being said, I'm sure there is a place for wind power. We just have to realize that it's nowhere near being "the solution"...
That being said, I'm sure there is a place for wind power. We just have to realize that it's nowhere near being "the solution"...
In the U.K. Globe and Mail, Neil Reynolds provides this and more:
"It turns out that Denmark's vast array of turbines often produce minimal electricity when demand is high, maximum electricity when demand is low. Basing his analysis on data from a single year (2002), Mr. Sharman reported that wind power produced less than 1 per cent of the country's electricity supply on 54 different days. On one of these 54 days, the wind turbines took more power from the grid than they produced. (Wind turbines consume considerable electricity whether winds are blowing or not blowing.)
British author and energy analyst Tony Lodge makes the same point in a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, a London think tank. 'Not a single conventional power plant has been closed in the period that Danish wind farms have been developed,' he says. “Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants have had to be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity and to provide backup.”
Mr. Lodge says it is not practical to turn coal-fired plants off and on as winds rise and fall – because ramping them up consumes more fuel (and emits more carbon dioxide) than running them at a constant rate. Thus Denmark relies almost exclusively on coal-fired plants for its own consumption and exports its wind power at whatever off-peak price it can get.
Only 3.3 per cent of Denmark's wind power gets “accepted” on the grid for domestic consumption. In 2003, Denmark exported 84 per cent of its wind-generated electricity at money-losing rates. And CO{-2}? In 2006, Denmark produced 36 per cent more carbon emissions than the year before."
