Hasham Abbas
The only worthwhile metric of whether or not wind power is worth it is if the cost of energy to the consumer is reducing, without the application of government subsidies.
physics314
One myth dispelled (intermittency trouble), one left to go: namely that renewable energy needs subsidies. The only reason this is presently the case is because of the far larger subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear sector. Not only direct subsidies, tax breaks, and subsidized insurance, but a slew of protections for these industries that effectively shield them from paying pollution damages in civil lawsuits, or flat out exempt them from environmental requirements that everyone else is subject to. Not to mention the trillions of $$ that the general public is obliged to pay in military expenditures to keep the oil flowing...
Make no mistake: if the playing field were level, there would be zero coal and nuclear, and much less natural gas and oil in the energy business, including transportation. The development of renewable energy sources has been held back decades by the massive subsidies to fossil and nuclear.
Phil Clemow
"The only worthwhile metric of whether or not wind power is worth it is if the cost of energy to the consumer is reducing, without the application of government subsidies."
This is rubbish. If it was a tenth of the price to produce our electricity by burning children would that make it the right choice?
ivan4
So they are admitting that wing has generated in 18 months nearly the DAILY demand for electrical energy.
For those interested in all the generated electricity in the UK go to http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ where it is shown in diagrammatic form.
@physics314. Would you please give citations for your claims of subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear power generators.
BeWalt
@Hasham: I'm all for using that metric. And doing the math correctly.
That would mean, every type of energy source should be evaluated including every bit of subsidies and especially every last penny of externalities, to be best of our knowledge.
If people who really know their stuff do this (economists for example), renewables don't just come out on top. They VASTLY come out on top.
Right now we only enjoy cheap and easy energy because we do not give a dang about what happens in 300 or 400 years. For example, we burn in our cars the very stuff that can be used to make solar cells (polymer type, needs another decade of R&D) ...and for what: to transport our lazy selves.
That particular example gets me every time I think about it: We burn oil for a one-time benefit that causes a rat's tail of bad side effects. Then, it's gone, for ever. We keep harping on how great an economy we are running based on that. And once it's gone, we'll surely still be pointing out how expensive it is to make solar cells. Which it will be, because we burned all of a potential raw material for that. What a smart "intelligent" species we are...
Dekarate
Last I looked solar cells are silicon based and oil is largely carbon based. Two different raw materials.
But here is a real question. The UK pulled 23,7000 gigawatts of energy out of the wind - did that alter the climate? - the butterfly flaps its wings in China and there is a hurricane in the Atlantic effect.
The CO2 argument is crap. The recent highest peak was 400ppm and 525Million years ago it was 7,000ppm (long before man) and the planet was a lot greener.
physics314
@ivan4
I'm not sure if you are really uninformed or deliberately feigning ignorance. In any case, below are a couple of search terms that should lead you to plenty of the evidence of fossil and nuclear subsidies. I will assume that you have, in fact, heard of the Iraq wars, and some of the large oil spills (Exxon, BP...) which have cost the beneficiaries and offenders next to nothing.
- Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act - Halliburton loophole - American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut
Other subsidies include the persistent exclusion of coal ash from hazardous waste designation. To say nothing of the glossing over the environmental destruction of mountaintop removal mining and coal ash spills.
An excellent article documenting the net-negative effect on GDP of fossil fuel use (and that's excluding the effects of climate change!): Muller et al., American Economic Review (2011) 1649
Justin Chamberlin
The trick to this report is the word "forecast", as in energy from the coal-fired reserves "due to wind output being lower than forecast." All this metric says is that the National Grid people are pretty good forecasters of when and how hard the wind is blowing. It says absolutely nothing, not a word, about power generated by coal/oil/gas/nuclear when the wind isn't blowing.
Shame on those not noticing that dirty trick that completely covers up a serious intermittency problem that is and always will be endemic to wind power. Approximately 80% of Denmark's *installed capacity* consists of wind generators, and when those don't turn hard enough to generate electricity for days or weeks at a time (which happens, I used that very data in a school presentation a couple years ago), Denmark has to import electricity from dirty German coal-fired plants. And Denmark is one of the prime places on the planet for wind power resources. Imagine trying to build enough turbines to serve, say, the northeastern U.S. without relying on solar (think about the weather over there), coal, oil/gas, nuclear, or anything else. See this map from the EIA for why that's not a feasible alternative: http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/images/charts/US_wind_resource_map-large.jpg
Unless there is a drastic, revolutionary, and as-of-yet unforeseeable change in wind turbine design or we figure out how to make the wind blow consistently without further energy input, wind power can not be a source of base load power. Ever. It has its uses but it just can't replace coal or nuclear as a base load source.
And just because it needs to be said, solar is even worse. There is much more promise for future technology developments to get over the hump but it still has an intermittency problem for most places and where there isn't that problem we would have to destroy thousands of square miles of desert habitat to make it even remotely viable.
Thinking long-term, we as a species need to continue to work energy usage - improve efficiency and all that - and figure out how to make helium-3 fusion work, because all the coal, oil, uranium, thorium, and natural gas in the world won't last more than another couple hundred years and there simply isn't enough wind or solar power available to handle the energy needs of a growing, industrializing population.
Rann Xeroxx
I personally think AGW is bunk, that CO2 is a GH gas, just not a very powerful one, that the Earth has been in a warming trend since the last ice age and it has almost nothing to do with CO2.
With that said, I think we should get away from burning coal, it's just such a dirty way of producing power. I also agree with the other poster in that we should do away with subsidies to fossil fuel production (as well as "clean" energy) and that what we spend on the military that is directly related to fossil fuel should be equated and tacked onto the fuel cost (same with clean).
I think electric cars are the future but the government is abismal at picking winners and should leave that to the private sector. I also think nuclear (fission and fusion) should be research and added to the list of "clean" energy that is domestically produced.
This is not a right/left/green/etc issue, just an issue of sustainability, economics, and access.
Craig Jennings
"The CO2 argument is crap. The recent highest peak was 400ppm and 525Million years ago it was 7,000ppm (long before man) and the planet was a lot greener." Don't suppose you know what the sea level was at the same time Dekarate?