Comments on NoFreeWind - The Heavy Price We Pay for Windpower: How Often Does The Turbine Produce Power?

Well, to be perfectly frank, I understood very lit...

2012-01-03T06:20:55.977-05:00

Well, to be perfectly frank, I understood very little of the mechanics of the paper, or the toing and froing of the arguments.
However I have a very strong feeling in my water that these windmills are a horror story for the landscape, are an expensive folly, making a lot of money for a small number of people, from many that have little.
What I have seen described is the cost of manufacture and siting, versus the so called benefits.

To Anonymous Grid Manager Above: It is all about s...

2010-05-07T20:21:27.499-04:00

To Anonymous Grid Manager Above: It is all about size. A schedule that is 1/10 of 1% of the system can be off by 50% without affecting the schedule. The meters have a bigger error than that. Now make the wind farms 30% of the system whole and see what happens. If 30% of online generation had a error of 50% then you just lost 15% of your online generation. Bing!

GE is huge in the turbine business and makes a lar...

2009-06-18T14:35:18.279-04:00

GE is huge in the turbine business and makes a large percentage of them. They purchased them from Enron. The Federal Gov't allows something called 5-year double declining balance accelerated depreciation, which essentially gives the investors about 65% of their money back in the first five years through tax credits. Read more about it on this tab:
http://www.nofreewind.com/wind-cost.html
and this article
http://nofreewind.com/files/bigmoney_wind.pdf

do you know if the federal gov. buys these wind tu...

2009-06-18T13:57:06.924-04:00

do you know if the federal gov. buys these wind turbines? And if they are made by GE?

Right on BRO. We are being led now by idiotic mor...

2009-06-04T06:14:58.319-04:00

Right on BRO. We are being led now by idiotic morons. And they want to add electric cars to the grid and run them with this wind? That might be a thought if they wanted to build MANY nuclear plants, but turbines are constructed only so we can watch the wheel spin and create more green jobs, each one who will vote Democrat.

The first anonymous poster is completely full of i...

2009-06-04T06:01:22.865-04:00

The first anonymous poster is completely full of it. The capapcity factors alone are proof positive that nukes are the answer and are hands down more relaible than wind farms. I am pretty sure he has never sat in the hot seat of a grid mananger when wind fell abruptly during peak times. In Texas the nukes CPSES and STP are at capacity facotrs of greatr than 90%. You can google them and find this number while wind is less than 25%. So the first anonymous is just plain ignorant or a green weenie.

To Anonymous Grid Manager Above: What exactly do ...

2009-05-23T20:08:47.796-04:00

To Anonymous Grid Manager Above: What exactly do you do wuen the wind "marketers" delivery deviates from schedule as the do 85%+ of the time? WHat do you do when those schedules reflect the graphical real world experience shown by NoFreeWind and imposes heavy ramping duty of balancing needs and plants?

I too have many years experience in grid planning/ops and have yet to see teh costs of wind integration imposed wher eit belongs--on the wind operators: they should pay for spin, black start, volage/freq. support, their own netowrk upgrades and MANY of high cost items--inclding the additional fuel they force other units to consume. Firming at 2 cents? NOT such a deal--I can buy power+energy at 2 cents.

Let me close by saying if the grid manager believe...

2009-05-20T10:59:27.108-04:00

Let me close by saying if the grid manager believes that CO2 caused by fossil fuels emissions are responsible for "global warming" and will lead to future catastrophic consequences for humanity, then I accept your point of view. Your position would be that, if electricity prices double, and we waste of 30% of fuel per kilowatt in integrating wind, the 70% of fossil fuel per kWh that we save would be worth the price to "humanity" in the long run. You know what is good for us. Then we have nothing further to discuss. If that is your religion, I won't argue religion.

But don't use your position to scold me as a lay person saying I am spouting misinformation that there will be no price, cost or difficulty integrating the wind into the grid for the consumer. All you have to do is go to my web site integration tab and you can clearly see there have been volumes written on this subject by the experts already.

PJM only gives the wind a 13% capacity credit and ...

2009-05-20T10:04:35.711-04:00

PJM only gives the wind a 13% capacity credit and that is a joke. Because turbines are dead still in the summer in the Pennsylvania. Look at this chart,
http://nofreewind.com/pjm_08_wind.jpg

, which comes from here
http://nofreewind.com/PA2008hourlywind.xls

This is the PJM excel output for daily wind for the entire 2008. You know what it means. It shows that PJM has about 25,000 MW of wind in their grid, yet in the summertime the average output is about 3,000-4,000 MW or just over 10% of the capacity.(for our purposes here forget about time) But for many hours and many days there is little electricity being produced by billions and billions spend on infrastructure. NOTHING. Like I said, look to your right and look to your left, there will be no layoffs! My business will die and yours will grow, sure you can handle it!!!

Forget about everything I said above, because that is not the heaviest price we will pay. My main objection to these monsters is the enormous ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION that occurs with wind power. You do know to replace a medium-sized 1000 MW power plant we would need 2100 turbines times .27 capacity *1.75 MW! These would require 2100 times 4 acres of clearcut or almost 10,000 acres and this energy would provide NO robustness to your grid? No reliability!

You are comparing wind reliability to nuclear? What kind of Cali Green do you like? My local nuclear plant produced 100% output last year. 723 continuous days of producing 100% electricity. We have had not worst case scenarios in this country in 30 years. The worst case scenario is realized for wind almost every other day, AND every single day for us consumers. You may not care about my electric bill, but I certainly do, all for the pleasure of "watching the wheel spin". When do the layoffs start, tell me? Any coworkers getting queasy out your way? Chainsaws, hundreds of concrete trucks, massive steel structures, all part of the Environmentalist big plan.

Who am I? I’m Citizen Blogger who is paying $12,000/year in electricity costs and I know soon it will be much, much more. You company on the other hand will likely grow more profitable and will absolutely expand its’ influence on society with increased employment and infrastructure to go with it. To me, it will be the same old plug and the same old cord. There will be no “benefits” except I may look at the ugly steel turbines and be assured someone is trying to do something about the non-existent energy problem. We have hundreds of years of coal and natural gas, NO AIR POLLUTION anymore, and nuclear will always be there. You know oil makes up only a very small percentage of our electricity production.

I appreciate your contribution to this discussion, don’t be afraid to correct any errors or inaccuracies I might make. I’m only a Citizen Blogger, not an electricity expert. But I am an expert to know what type of hamburger, health care, automobile and clothes which I can freely purchase in the marketplace. I want to learn. But please don't post mumbo jumbo referring to WECC, STP and ERCOT without explaining yourself. This is a very big world!

Didn't you read what I wrote? Didn't you read that...

2009-05-20T08:26:24.424-04:00

Didn't you read what I wrote? Didn't you read that I clearly stated that power plants follow the load changes(65%) that occur every single day and gave links to load/demand graphs. My point, and I have a few more graphs that I will upload, is how can a grid follow a fluctuating output that has enormous variability even during a 15 minute time span. However the main reason I wrote this post was to explain a turbine power output versus the wind and how that creates the variable output.

What is the goal of my blog? As you are well aware, before about the year 2000 my electricity needs were handled by experts like you. Change has occurred in the electrical power industry and the power I buy is now a "political" issue, not an issue determined by experts or by the consumer. I buy expensive wind power now because I am forced to. I buy expensive wind power because my legislators have determined that is what I need. In a free market wind would go the way of the electric car. A great idea in "theory" but so full of limitations and extra costs that only a miniscule amount of consumers would ever even consider such nonsense except in very special situations. It is a niche industry.

2 cents/kWh may not be much to you as a grid manager but that is almost a 25% premium of the 11 cent/kWh I pay for electricity in Pennsylvania. Then add in the hidden 2.1cPTC/Kwh(federal) and then all the tax breaks that these monsters are given by localities where they are. We are now up to almost 50% of my normal rate. Of course the 50% is hidden because the wind energy is still a miniscule amount of the total grid energy. Then let's add the very favorable double accelerated appreciation of capital costs for construction.

I appreciate your expertise, but when a grid has excess capacity of maybe 15% ready at all times to handle emergencies, then the fluctuation of a couple percent of wind in the grid can be easily handled by your "robust" grid. But it is all a hidden cost to the consumer with no real benefits, except the mistaken belief that the turbines are going to decrease global warming.

My post above only attempts to describe a very small part of the total problem. Of course the intrahour variability of adding a couple percent wind is not going to take the grid down. You will make sure of that. Of course the European countries have a much higher percentage of wind and do not suffer blackouts. YOU WILL MAKE SURE OF THAT. But do you know what they pay for electricity? Go to the front page of my web site. www.nofreewind.com and look at the c/kWh. Look how Ontario will be buying wind at 13.5c/kWh while their wholesale costs are 4c/kWh. You may not care about the costs, but I do. Do you know how much we are going to pay for Offshore Wind, more than 13c/kWh! wholesale, more than my current electric bill. All the while there will not be one single layoff of your co-workers nor not one single REAL powerplant shut down. Not One. You tell me expert, if you have 3% wind in your grid now, did 3% of your coworkers get laid off? Are your co-workers worrying about the layoff that 10% wind might bring? HA HA HA. No, you now have weather forecasters, a wind department and miles and miles of extra transmission lines that only work less than 30% of the time, all with extra service workers. Our country is now focusing our energies by spending billions on the Wind, when it will not add ANY real capacity to the grid. NONE. cont.

Just so you know, current wind "firming" costs are...

2009-05-20T01:27:44.152-04:00

Just so you know, current wind "firming" costs are about 2 cents/kWh. These "firming" costs are surprisingly low considering all the huff huff blow your house down BS that you guys busy yourselves with.

You might think wind variability is a hassle but it's not the worst case scenario from a grid reliability standpoint - nuclear is. To be specific: Palo Verde in WECC and STP in ERCOT. Palo Verde is persona non grata in the WECC grid community. We joke about it. Look into it.

What is your goal with this blog?

I'm a grid manager. The wind marketers send me their schedules and my system runs them. Bing... Just like that. Makes no difference to me. I curtail conventional power contracts much more often than wind. Our systems are robust... Do you have any idea what you're talking about?