Big Wind Farms Dying Early and Often -- The Wind Power Scam Benefits Wealthy and Politically Connected Developers

A new study by University of Edinburgh researchers finds that wind turbines break down and wear out much more quickly than wind developers and wind proponents claim. As a result, large wind farms quickly turn into huge blights on the landscape -- wind farm graveyards.

Instead of a lifespan of up to 30 years, as wind proponents claim, wind turbines were found to have a useful lifespan of less than 15 years!

The analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines — the biggest study of its kind —warns that they will continue to generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years.

...The study estimates that routine wear and tear will more than double the cost of electricity being produced by wind farms in the next decade. Older turbines will need to be replaced more quickly than the industry estimates... _Big New Study of Wind Farm's Failures

In the US, wind farm graveyards are accumulating, and no one seems to know what to do about the unsightly disgraces.

Faux environmental greens like to rave about the grand future of big wind energy, but the reality paints a much darker picture.

Without extremely generous government supports, no one would dream of building a wind farm -- they are simply not profitable in terms of power production. And without harsh government mandates which force utilities to buy and use wind power -- whether it is in the economic interest of utilities to do so or not -- wind projects would die rapidly, before being born.

Wind is not really about helping the environment -- because big wind energy famrs cause much more damage to the environment than it could ever relieve.

Big wind is actually all about graft and corrupt payoffs, back and forth between politicians and wealthy wind developers, and the hypocrisy of big money green faux environmental gangs.

For North America, Wind is a Waste of Money

A new report from the American Tradition Institute clearly spells out why big wind is a tragic waste of resources for North America. Even using very generous estimates and assumptions, the report nevertheless reveals that big wind costs at least 2 - 3 X more per unit of energy than more reliable forms of power such as coal, gas, and nuclear.

A fascinating new report by George Taylor and Tom Tanton at the American Tradition Institute called “The Hidden Costs of Wind Electricity” asserts that the cost of wind power is significantly understated by the EIA’s numbers. In fact, says Taylor, generating electricity from wind costs triple what it does from natural gas. That’s because the numbers from the EIA and wind boosters fail to take into account a host of infrastructure and transmission costs. First off — the windiest places are more often far away from where electricity is needed most, so the costs of building transmission lines is high. So far many wind projects have been able to patch into existing grid interconnections. But, says Taylor, those opportunities are shrinking, and material expansion of wind would require big power line investments. Second, the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so power utilities have found that in order to balance out the variable load from wind they have to invest in keeping fossil-fuel-burning plants on standby. When those plants are not running at full capacity they are not as efficient. Most calculations of the cost of wind power do not take into account the costs per kWh of keeping fossil plants on standby or running at reduced loads. But they should, because it is a real cost of adding clean, green, wind power to the grid.

Taylor has crunched the numbers and determined that these elements mean the true cost of wind power is more like double the advertised numbers.

ATI Hidden Costs of Wind (PDF)

He explains that he started with 8.2 cents per kWh, reflecting total installation costs of $2,000 per kw of capacity. Then backed out an assumed 30-year lifespan for the turbines (optimistic), which increases the cost to 9.3 cents per kwh. Then after backing out the effect of subsidies allowing accelerted depreciation for wind investments you get 10.1 cents. Next, add the costs of keeping gas-fired plants available, but running at reduced capacity, to balance the variable performance of wind — 1.7 cents. Extra fuel for those plants adds another 0.6 cents. Finally, tack on 2.7 cents for new transmission line investments needed to get new wind power to market. The whole shebang adds up to 15 cents per kwh. _Forbes

The report is far too generous to big wind in the real world. The actual lifetime of a big wind turbine is closer to 20 years than 30 years. During that short lifespan, significant funds must be spent for upkeep and replacement of expensive parts that are prone to breakdown.

There exist many other costs of wind power which remain largely hidden and otherwise unaccounted for, due to the underlying irrationality of forcing utilities and ratepayers to accomodate an inherently unreliable form of energy. As we discover how exorbitantly expensive big wind is turning out to be, and how unnecessary the faux environmental turn to the intermittent unreliables -- more and more taxpayers and ratepayers are likely to grow restless and more difficult to contain and control.

Germany, Spain, and California may well serve as test cases -- examples of government instigated high dives by entire societies into the shallow pool of intermittent unreliable energy. As the dependency on unreliable energy grows, the hidden costs to societies become more difficult to hide. Watch and learn.

“Because wind is an intermittent source of electricity, it needs appropriate amounts of fossil-fueled capacity ready at all times to balance its large and rapid variations,” said Tom Tanton, Director of Science & Technology Assessment at ATI and a co-author of the report. “Those primary fossil plants then operate less efficiently than if they were running full-time without wind, meaning that any savings of gas and coal or any reductions in emissions are much less than simple calculations would indicate.” _ATI

How to Lie With Price Comparison Charts

The chart below comes from RealClearEnergy, a broad spectrum energy news and commentary website. It is a comparison of "levelised costs" between various types of energy sources -- including wind "power" with and without the US federal PTC price support.

Real Clear Energy
The article containing the graph claims that "wind underprices the competition, but . . ." And that is a very big "but" indeed. Here is more on how the editors of Real Clear Energy compiled their chart:

The graph shows the levelized costs of electricity in 2010 dollars per megawatt hour for the main forms of generating electricity. Levelized costs are defined as follows: investment and installation costs, operations and maintenance costs, fuel costs, life of the generating unit, and energy generated by the unit. The horizontal axis breaks out the major forms of generation: wind , natural gas, coal and nuclear. Wind (represented in green) is represented both with and without the production tax credit, which awards a tax reduction per megawatt. _RCE

The article admits that wind is only "competitive" when it operates a maximum capacity, and that wind "cannot always operate at maximum capacity." The authors of the editorial deserve a "comic of the year award" for stating the above with a straight face. Wind is unpredictable, and rarely operates at maximum capacity, and when it does it is usually at a time when the grid does not need the "power," forcing the grid to buy unneeded energy and dump it (waste it) at significant expense.

That is a key point. The unpredictable intermittency of the wind destroys any price advantage it may present on a constructed chart -- with or without a PTC. Modern industrial infrastructure is designed around affordable, reliable, high quality electrical power. Big wind energy is the enemy of affordability, reliability, and quality of power.

More from William Tucker:

At best, windmills generate electricity only one-third of the time. That means to get the real costs you have to combine the $90.25 or $68.25 figure with something else. The choice today is peaking natural gas generators, since only they can be ramped up and down to match wind’s variations. But when you combine the weighted costs of natural gas peakers and wind without the production tax credit you get $148.22, far more expensive than coal or nuclear. Even with the production tax credit, the cost remains at $104.50, slightly higher than nuclear. Now General Electric is now marketing a combined-cycle plant that it says can be ramped up and down to partner for wind. But if combined cycle is already $15 cheaper than wind without the production tax credit, then what’s the sense of adding windmills? Even with the PTC, the differential is only $6, which is hardly worth the effort.

So the fuel of choice these days is definitely natural gas – which explains why everybody is building natural gas plants and nobody is building coal or nuclear. But can we count on these low prices lasting forever or even ten years? _William Tucker

The wind industry in the US and elsewhere in the modern world, cannot survive without massive government subsidies -- which invariably go to wealthy investors and developers. Most of these investors and developers are closely connected to ruling interests inside of government, for some odd reason.

EIA via WaPo

The above chart gives one an idea of how dependent big wind is upon big government tax loopholes to wealthy and well-connected lobbyists, developers, and financial interests.

The Case Against Wind (PDF) by J. Lesser October 2012

It is time to stop lying and obscuring the brutal truth about intermittent unreliable forms of energy. Wind power is an ancient source of energy, but it has not adapted well to modern industrial power needs, and it never will. The attempt to square the circle in this situation is the result of a blind adherence to a faux environmental, pseudoscientific quasi-religion known as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. We at the Al Fin Institutes refer to this superstitious belief as "carbon hysteria."

Until the irrational fear of carbon is eradicated from media, government, academia, and faux environmental factions, these groups will continue to promote irrational, counter-productive, unreliable, and non-economic forms of energy to replace a current system which is in need of far more rational upgrades, for the money that will be spent.

Why Wind Won't Work

The problem with big wind energy is so basic and elementary that it is easily overlooked by those possessing a strong a priori belief in the absolute necessity to develop wind "power."

Al Fin began his exploration of energy with such a strong a priori belief in support of both big wind and big solar energy. In the course of teaching himself about energy, he assisted a number of installations of home-scale wind, solar, and micro-hydro systems. These projects were educational as well as fun. People who are willing to work to build off-grid small scale power can be fun to be around, and often know how to party.

But there is a huge difference between using wind (and solar) for off-grid residencies, and attempting to use large-scale wind as a large proportion of total energy generating capacity for a finely balanced continental power grid. That is the lesson that Al Fin had to learn, and which modern societies must now learn -- before they destroy themselves in pursuit of impossibilities.

...wind turbines by themselves do not add electrical capacity to a grid. They must be paired with other generators of equivalent power to compensate for wind variations and for the stability of the electricity grid.

This pairing—wind and backup—has limits because of the huge rapid variability of wind that must be compensated for by the backup power source. It is estimated that this pairing can account for only 20 percent of the capacity of the grid. This means that wind can be only 6 percent of the generation (.20 x .3). This limit has already been reached in Europe by countries such as Germany and Denmark. _Ulrich Decher PhD

What is the problem, which makes it impossible for wind turbines alone to add electrical capacity to a finely balanced power grid? The wind itself tends to rise and fall -- unpredictably. This lack of predictability is very dangerous to a finely balanced grid. Grid output must be matched precisely with grid demand -- and grid demand itself is often unpredictable. Attempting to supply an unpredictable load with an unpredictable supply is the height of idiocy -- particularly when you are dealing with something as critical to the life or death of a society as electrical power.

...according to a new Reason Foundation/Independence Institute report, the storage, backup, and idling costs become prohibitive as wind’s share of total generation increases beyond 10-20%.

The report, The Limits of Wind Power by William Korchinski (PDF), contains several sobering graphics. Figure 6 from the study shows how variable (intermittent) the wind can be, reducing output as much as 16 MW per minute. _Marlo Lewis

It is crucial for anyone seriously interested in energy to become immersed in the type of details discussed in reports such as the one written by Korchinski (PDF).

Good intentions can make one feel good about himself, but hard-headed, knowledge-based policy is what will keep a society prosperous and healthy. Green policies -- such as the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast policies promoted by the US Obama administration, the Julia Gillard government in Australia, or any one of a number of European governments (and the EU in general) -- will eventually destroy a society through energy starvation and impoverishment. Such societies eventually pollute the air, water, and soil in far more damaging ways than societies which were allowed by prosperity to move up the energy technology curve -- eventually arriving at safe, clean, and abundant sources of reliable and predictable power supplies.

Ideological efforts to short-circuit that trajectory of development -- such as modern green leftist ideologies -- will doom any societies which adopt them to ultimate failure.

Wind energy is unpredictably intermittent -- and thus unreliable. It is also enormously expensive in terms of materials, land, money, and other scarce resources. Big wind will take any problem you are trying to solve -- and make it worse.

It is fine to hold strong opinions. But make sure that they are backed up with something stronger than good intentions.

Guest Post on the US Wind Tax Credit

The following commentary on the US Wind Tax Credit comes via Daniel Simmons, via the National Journal

Wind is old electricity generating technology and after more than 30 years of subsidies, it is time for wind to grow up and compete on its own, instead of expecting to get paid by taxpayers to do its job.

Congress has been supporting wind production since at least 1978 on the premise that wind is an infant industry requiring a brief leg-up to become cost-competitive with coal, natural gas and other sources of reliable, affordable energy. But if wind is an infant industry, it has to be one of the oldest infant industries on the planet.

In 1882, Thomas Edison built the Pearl Street Station in New York City—a coal fired power plant. A mere 5 years later, a Scottish academic named James Blyth built a wind turbine to make electricity and run the lights on his cabin. After 125 years of generating electricity, wind should be ready to leave its government crib and stand on its own.

Wind lobbyists argue that the PTC is necessary to continue building wind installations, while also lobbying for mandates requiring utilities to buy wind electricity. This shows that wind is not ready for primetime, but is subsidy- and government edict-dependent. If wind can’t compete after 125 years without consumers being forced to both subsidize and purchase it, when will it be?

The PTC is so helpful to wind developers because the size of the tax credit is very large compared to the wholesale price of electricity. The production tax credit is 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced from wind (and other specified sources). The wholesale price of electricity is less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour in some markets and about 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in other markets. This makes the production tax credit worth 50 to 70 percent of the wholesale price of electricity. If Chevy Volts got the same treatment, the feds would be subsidizing each one to the tune of $19, 572 to $27,401 per car and people would be forced to buy them. (http://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/volt/2013/options.html?style=200424007&sub=hatchback 50-70% of listed price)

Another problem with the PTC is that the electricity market is built to match electricity demand with electricity production, but the PTC gives wind producers no incentives for electricity production when electricity demand is high. When electricity demand is high, electricity generation is very, very valuable, but to wind producers electricity demand matters little; they make money when the wind blows, which often happens to be when electricity is least needed. The wind industry gets paid to make energy when it isn’t needed but doesn’t make it when it is needed, and still wants more subsidies and government to force consumers to buy its product. If that doesn’t sound like a government boondoggle, I don’t know what does.

The PTC doesn’t help Americans or America. The latest proposal would cost taxpayers $12.1 billion over ten years but it doesn’t help make the electricity grid more robust or economical. Now is the time for government to tell a 125-year-old infant to grow up. _Daniel Simmons

Al Fin: The first and last paragraphs contain the essence of the argument. First, wind is an old industry and should not be coddled as if it were an infant. Two, wind is unable to generate power to meet the crucial time-linked demands of utility loads. Wind cannot survive without government special preferences -- a ruinously exorbitant affirmative action for wind.

It is time for American energy consumers and voters to grow up and force their government to grow up as well. The US economy is being hamstrung by foolish energy policies that are based upon ideology rather than practical realities. That foolishness must end.

The Hazards of Intermittent Energy Sources: Case Study Big Wind Power

Many otherwise intelligent people have become infatuated with the idea of using big wind and big solar power to replace coal, gas, and nuclear for generating electrical power. But none of these people have come to realistic terms with the problem of intermittency. Unpredictably intermittent sources of energy do not go well with the rigorous demands of electrical power grids. Anyone who wants to plan for a more abundant future would do well to understand why this is the case.


This video version of the famous John Droz slideshare presentation on big wind energy, is a fairly succinct and easy to follow "once-through" look at the problems of intermittent energy sources -- specifically big wind. The slideshare presentation is always available for a more lingering look, or for digesting the ideas a little bit at a time.

There are a number of PDF reports on the web which look at the problematic impacts of intermittent energy sources on the power grid. The intelligent thinker will want to gain as wide a perspective on this issue as possible, given the modern green socio-political steamroller attempting to force the intermittent unreliable energy sources onto power grids. Even if it kills us, it is for our own good, we are told.

More information:

High Cost and Low Value of Electricity from Wind (PDF)

Real Cost of Wind Power (PDF)

Electricity Costs: The Folly of Wind (PDF) via GWPF

Why is wind power so expensive? (PDF via GWPF)

Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark (PDF)

More information on this topic is available on the Al Fin Energy sidebar, and in articles posted on Al Fin Energy under the topics of wind, solar, and renewables.