Chasing windmills
While they have become the poster child of the green movement, the environmental benefit of windmills for the generation of electrical power is questionable. A careful reading of the data suggests that as far as the total carbon cost is concerned, it would have been better for the planet if the windmill had not be built in the first place. A good synopsis is here: http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_costs_of_electricity.htm
I would have liked to see a different image used for the economic summit promotion image than a windmill. As the greatest gains are to be had in the transportation sector, maybe a bicycle would be better?
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Great Partial Analysis but not 'Comparative'
A full long-term cost analysis, like an environmental assessment is only meaningful when you compare one alternative to another. In other words, how does this compare to burning natural gas, a solar farm, nuclear, etc. to produce the same amount of electricity? And in a proper comparison, the health damage costs and environmental costs of pollution from alternatives need to counted also. Analysing in a vacuum, the cost of wind generation electricity is somewhat useless if not assessed side-by-side other alternatives. (The exception being if you can prove that by simple ‘conservation’ the additional electricity is not needed.)
Disclosure: although the website itself states it has no affiliations, the author does not disclose who if anyone funded his research.
(Personally, I have some reservations about ‘wind farms’ and even ‘solar farms’. Governments and industry like to combine to create giant expensive mega-projects to provide employment and enrich themselves with prestige, power and profit. While roof-top sized solar and wind turbines would empower and enrich individuals, not use up any more land and have almost zero transmission costs. But this is just unsubstantiated opinion on my part.)
Conservation AND replacement
Conservation may prove that additional wind energy isn't needed, but new wind installations can (eventually) be used to replace use of fossil fuels. We shouldn't think of wind as mainly additional energy, but as replacement energy. Regardless of how well we conserve, we'll still need to produce some electricity.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins, Barrie ON - although I'm on Cabinet (Nat'l Rev. and Ecol. Fiscal Reform), views here are my own and may not reflect official GPC positions. Please visit www.ErichtheGreen.ca
Good point.
Good point.
What carbon costs?
The study you link doesn't seem to list any carbon costs - it doesn't even contain the word "carbon".
All that study has done is put a cost on wind electricity which is higher than that some might assume. To do so, it has made a number of questionable assumptions. It also works from subsidy models which apply in the US but not in Canada. Finally, it makes no comparison to other systems which could supply the same amount of energy - and pretty much every pre-wind source of electricity also benefitted from favourable tax treatment or other subsidies in the past (or present). (And the article is 7 years old).
Therefore, the study you link doesn't really provide any useful information on whether wind is a better or worse electricity source than any other.
Wind energy isn't perfect - no technology is - but it has many advantages over other, more common electricity generation sources which are still being used and built. I certainly would not spurn it. I have seen other "environmental" groups which have formed specifically to oppose wind for essentially esthetic reasons, but exaggerate economic or ecological objections to avoid being unmasked as NIMBY or suchwise.
The author of that particular article has written a series of anti-wind articles; the other one I looked at relied on some misleading assumptions which invalidate its conclusions.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins, Barrie ON - although I'm on Cabinet (Nat'l Rev. and Ecol. Fiscal Reform), views here are my own and may not reflect official GPC positions. Please visit www.ErichtheGreen.ca
Wind costs...
The study is from 2003. There have been some important improvements in wind farm costs in the last few years. It has been shown that winglets at the end of turbine blades increase efficency (like on planes). A very recent study, I believe by MIT showed that turbine blades should alternate between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. If you imagine the turbulence caused by the turbine blades, I think this is really an obvious concept. These two ideas alone increase efficiency by about 10% and are essentially free to implement (aside from patent issues.)
In the meantine, grid levelling technology, aka, large rechargeable batteries are becoming cheaper, thus increasing the effectiveness of wind technology. And lastly, wind turbines are simply becoming cheaper.
I may agree that wind turbines right now are not affordable without subsidization, but we need to facilitate the creation of an industry so that the infrastructure is in place and mature by the time the technology becomes affordable without subsidization, probably about 15 to 20 years from now.
On a side note, if you don't like wind turbines, you should like the adoption of natural gas over coal as it reduces carbon dioxide output, and is a great bridge technology. Methane, which is 4 hydrogen atoms per carbon, vs. coal which is less than 2 hydrogen per carbon. As a consequence, coal emits nearly twice as much carbon per unit energy output: http://www.naturalgas.org/environment/naturalgas.asp
Windmill discussion
Thanks for all the very interesting points. It has given me much to consider. While the study I linked is incomplete, it did point out some considerations like transmission needs that I do not find regularly mentioned. I made some unsubstanciated comments on total carbon costs which came from a different source. When I can track down that source I will post it.