Sunday
Jan022011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Greens distance themselves from wind power
The leading Scottish environmental group, the John Muir Trust, have described wind power as a scandal and called for an urgent review. The story is on the front page of today's Sunday Times. More details are available from Rob Schneider.
Reader Comments (83)
In today's Sunday Post (a Scottish paper, for those who are not familiar with it), Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland backs wind energy, so he is still sticking to the party line. However, maybe light is finally dawning.
What is it about the Greens????
They get every big issue wrong - DDT, nuclear energy, scientific agriculture including GM
and they go and realise it 20 years after everyone else.
This is, how you say, tragic.....
Oh deary deary deary me.....
You can almost taste the cognitive dissonance.
It will take the very strongest to not, shall we say,........gloat......
Just a leetle beet perhaps....
The leading Scottish environmental group, the John Muir Trust, have described wind power as a scandal
I can't afford to climb the ST's paywall but this has to be, by any reckoning, a non-story. The John Muir Trust has consistently opposed industrial-scale wind power for several years even if it has been at times been equivocal on some "community" schemes. Its objections are reported regularly in the regional (i.e. Scottish) press.
Besides, the JMT is a conservation group, not a "green" lobbying group. The distinction matters. The mainstream eco-lobby groups OTOH are showing no sign whatsoever that they might re-examine their role as satraps for the major energy utilities and their hangers-on. No volte face has taken place.
I'm afraid there's nothing new here, either about the report cited by the JMT (which came out in September) or the JMT position as a whole. They've always been against wind plants on the hills. They've got a campaign for wild land that has been going on for quite some time now. And I wouldn't see them as part of the Green movement at all.
As for Richard Dixon, he's the worst of the lot and he'll never change his position on wind. He'd be happy to see wind farms on every hill.
A post below par, your grace, if I may say so.
Dave beat me to it! Agree on all points.
"Renewables" seem to be doing quite well in Scotland if this press release is to be believed:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/12/23103647
It claims: "More than a quarter of Scotland's electricity needs now comes from renewables."
"More than a quarter of Scotland's electricity needs now comes from renewables."
Over a long period this may be true but not always when its needed and definately not enough during December when the winds were non-existent.
Can you imagine running a manufacturing plant only being able to run when the winds blows.
Andy,
Thanks for the update. The report news to me, and far as I can tell, not said in the Sunday times to be an old report. Clearly written in present tense. A big mystery, then, why it hit the front page of the paper today. Slow news day, I guess.
Any one who subscribes to news@wind-watch.org will realise that the John Muir Trust has consistently campaigned against wind farms ruining the Scottish scenery.
All wind developers consistently overstate the capacity (or load) factors of wind turbines, which in practice are pathetic. It is one of the many deceptions that the wind industry uses. Basically they tell lies to fool the public into thing wind turbines are wonderful.
Must say this was news to me too, but I stand corrected.
Thanks to everyone who pointed out JMT's previous position on this issue.
Bit of an OT, does anyone know whether the energy production figures for windmills is the gross figure or nett. I have heard that they consume energy to get started, to roll to prevent bearing damage and also some form of frost protection (presumably on the blades), any of this true.
John Lyon
John Lyon:
I have tried to get the answer to this question.
It is my understanding that under a ‘sell and buyback’ arrangement, the electricity produced is sold and metered for calculating and claiming Renewable Obligation Certificates whereas the electricity used to operate the turbines is bought back (i.e they sell electricity at a high price and buy some back at a low price). Thus gross electrical output rather than net electrical output is used to claim Renewable Obligation Certificates, which are used in official calculations of achieved capacity factors. The official capacity factors are thus based on gross output, rather than net output.
The wind industry does not provide information on the electricity consumption of wind turbines. Electricity is drawn from the grid by a wind turbine for many functions, including:
• Yaw control (maintaining the direction of the blades into the wind) and pitch control (the angle of the blades)
• Lighting
• Heating and de-icing
• Lubricating pumps
• Controls
• Exciting the stator
• Blade and shaft turning in light wind to prevent warping.
It is possible that a wind turbine could consume a considerable fraction of the electricity generated, but again, for obvious reasons, this scam is not disclosed or publicised by the industry.
Obviously when it is cold, the wind is not blowing and electricity demand is high, wind turbines are exacerbating the problem by drawing power from the grid.
Phillip
I guess if you can't get those questions answered, then I guess it makes no sense asking what is the "net - net" gain from the windmills. That is, what is the ACTUAL USABLE POWER delivered to a user? Probably next to nothing. However, that is the only measurement that really matters.
Don
You are correct. For obvious reasons the wind industry doesn't want the truth to be revealed. They get paid for the gross output. In the UK, the electricity produced is generally embedded onto the local distribution grid at typically 3.3 or 11kV. Because most wind farms are remote from customers, the losses along these low voltage lines (loss inversely proportional to the sq of the voltage) can be huge at times of low demand and thus, as you say the ACTUAL USABLE POWER delivered to a user is "not a lot".
Despite the clarifications and objections above, this still seems to be an important story just because the Sunday Times published it on the front page, indicating that, just perhaps, they are less enamored with everything green.
@O'Geary: "What is it about the Greens????"
Easy.
Bambi in a world of Godzilla; fantasy preferred to fact; romance over reality.
This story is NOT on the front page of the Sunday Times. I have it here in front of me. Nor did I notice it anywhere else in section 1.
BBD
Probably Scottish edition is different.
Is there a Scottish Edition I wonder?
Whoops - crossed
Yes, on a quiet news day the Scottish edition will often carry a local story.
I think it is quite wrong to lump all people concerned about the environment as "Greens" I think there are at least two camps - the environmentalists who are activists and want to make major political changes and; the conservationists who want to preserve the environment. I would call the JMT conservationist
In their "What We Think" we have
"Our wild land has come under increasing pressure from inappropriate developments such as roads, power lines, wind farms and industrial scale forestry."
My memory wasn't entirely accurate.
There was a press release about this by the JMT back in July, not September:
http://www.jmt.org/news.asp?s=2&cat=Campaigning&nid=JMT-N10486
It's not clear whether it's the same report flagged by Rob Schneider. But it seems to amount to pretty much the same thing.
Couple of things regarding Graphic Conception. Firstly, it's not clear whether under 'renewables' they're including hydro.
Secondly, the issue to be careful about is that like in the Denmark case, often enough we're told that wind has produced x % of the overall energy production but that doesn't mean that that amount has actually been consumed. They usually include "overproduction" on windy days that gets either wasted or sold for pennies to other nations. In the Danish case the claim was 20%, the reality around 11% I think. Similarly, here it has been claimed that on Sunday 22 August 2010 all the Scottish energy needs had (could have) been covered by wind. That was a very windy day with little consumption, but never mind...
So they may be claiming that a quarter of our production comes from renewables but what matters is: how much of that was actually *used*, as opposed to nominally produced and not actually used locally. It's an important distinction.
As of right now, wind is providing 0.2% of total electricity demand (and 0.2% over the last complete half hour too).
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Here in Denmark wind is providing about 5% right now
http://ny.energinet.dk/Flash/Forside/index.html
I, like probably every other traveller, has noticed how often windmills are seen to be idle.
I’ve often wondered, has there ever been any independent experimental data gathered about the relative efficiency of windmills?
I remember many years ago, long before the alternative powerists were even thought about (40 years?) reading a booklet issued by NOAA which actually compared efficiencies of windmills. Search as I may, I have never been able to re-discover this booklet. Does anyone know of it? have a copy?
The point of this is, I remember clearly that the conclusion of NOAA was that the most efficient design of a windmill was the vertical axis machine. search for “vertical axis machine” invariably brings up things like Savonius rotors, but the NOAA booklet showed a normal looking propeller mounted on a vertical axis in a closed tube, open only at the bottom, for wind entry. The wind entry rotated with the wind. I’ve sometimes wondered if with modern aerodynamics, such as flat blade ends, winglets, controlled tip clearance, and so on, the efficiency if this design could be improved.
Suppose it could. We would have a construction similar to a cooling tower, with the windmill inside. All of the weight would be low down.
Look, I dislike modern windmills, but rather than just witchhunt them out of existence, wouldn’t it be better to try and improve their efficiency, appearance, noise level and so on.
Blimey, the grip of the Ministry of Truth must be weakening. Even Louise Gray in the Telegraph yesterday
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/8234616/Wind-farms-becalmed-just-when-needed-the-most.html#disqus_thread
intimated that the contribution of wind-power to our energy needs is illusory.
As others above have said, the JMT are quite distinct from WWF and Greenpeace, in that their key objective is still the protection/conservation of wildland. So this report in the Sunday Times is not really news. And in reality it is WWF and Greenpeace that have moved away from their traditional (and I think perfectly acceptable) stance against habitat destruction in favour of alarmist AGW nonsense, while the JMT have stuck to more sensible conservationist principals. But I know there are some very clever folk in the JMT who oppose windmills not just for landscape reasons but because they know that they make feck all electricity when you need it most. And to their credit I don't recall any press releases by the JMT which either referred to or played upon AGW, unlike Oxfam and many other NGOs. I don't know the current trustees, and I am not saying they are all closet sceptics, but the JMT is a lot more sensible than all the other environmental NGOs and I think it will be a matter of time before at least some in the organisation start to publicly question AGW. I hope so anyway.
It amazes me that the MSM do not pull the First Minister up over the wind farm shambles. We cannot base our energy supply around an intermittent source that does not generate any significant amounts of electricity when we need it most, such as over the past month. It is a dereliction of duty by our political leaders who continue to listen only to the wrong people when seeking advice on energy related matters.
Of course political framework needed to fix the problem cannot reached until one of the mainstream parties disassociates itself from blind adherence to the CO2 = evil hypothesis.
Ed
BBD
It's not in my copy either today. But there is a story about apparently successful tests to artificially induce rain in Abu Dhabi by using an array of ionising masts to seed negatively charged dust particles in coastal humid air which then get carried aloft on convectional currents to induce rain clouds. It says the system for 100 million cubic metres water/month might cost around £7m compared to £850m for a desalination plant, and concludes- 'we come a big step closer to the point where we can increase the availability of fresh water to all in times of dramatic global changes'. But it does't say how they catch it from soaking into the sand.
There's also a piece about desirable v undesirable A levels for aspiring university applicants. Apparently Environmental Science is one of the undesirable, now.
Great. We can now create our own floods. Once it's started, can it be stopped? You don't mess with the weather (or climate).
Peter Melia:
The theoretical maximum efficiency was established by Betz as 59.3% (2^3/3^3). In realistic wind conditions the actually efficiency achieved by modern 3-bladed wind turbines is ~25-30%. Here the efficiency is the rotational energy of the turbine divided by the kinetic energy of the wind. Obviously by the time the rotational energy has been converted to electrical energy, the efficiency is much lower. The designers of turbine blades have got about as far as they can in terms of maximising the efficiency.
Natsman at 8:01 PM
You have to see Abu Dhabi when it rains - a Darwin Award at every road intersection - you shouldn't laugh....
I would just like to thank Phillip Bratby for his informative reply to my earlier question.
As a way of getting this point answered can I suggest that someone tries to get their MP to ask this question in the House. I would do it myself but when I last spoke to my MP he was still very much an AGW believer.
John Lyon
*just for the record* Jan 2, 2011 at 2:16 PM | O'Geary
So many lies about DDT and "greens" having killed 20Million children in Africa. So simple to debunk them all!
http://www.treated-bednet.com/agro-chemical.htm
INSECTICIDES FOR RESIDUAL SPRAYING
DDT still not banned for malaria control
DDT is still one of the first and most commonly used insecticides for residual spraying, because of its low cost, high effectiveness, persistence and relative safety to humans.
Commonly available formulations: 75% water-dispersible powder (the most commonly used); 25% emulsion concentrate.
..Supplying records
In the past several years, we supplied DDT 75% WDP to Madagascar, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Africa, Namibia, Solomon Island, Papua New Guinea, Algeria, Thailand, Myanmar for Malaria Control project, and won a good reputation from WHO and relevant countries' government
Wind
Whatever power wind provides, displaces fossil fuel from now to our children - every watt produced by wind preserves 3 (ish) watts of availble fossil fuel.
Scottland produces much renewable hydro power. When the wind blows they need only turn down the flow rate for their hydro plants (this is what hydro is good at). This enables the stored water to last longer/produce higher power.
Modern "windmills" use no gears (lower noise, more reliable, more efficient) and synchronize to the grid electronically (instantly). They can actually provide usefull grid input in the event of shortcircuit or similar overload faults.
The generators in these units do not use rare eath magnets (self excitation c.f car alternators)
When windturbines blow up, you do not need to evacuate a 30km zone around the site for a few decades.
IET document
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/energy/wind.cfm?type=pdf
Energy Data
http://www.ref.org.uk/uk-renewable-energy-data
thefordprefect @ 8:54 PM
"They can actually provide usefull grid input in the event of shortcircuit or similar overload faults".
Been reading the "Guardian Book of Lectric"? try Windpower for Dummies
I'd really, really like to be kinder - and I suppose ignoring this silliness would be the easy way but - but if you really don't know - STFU
All
DDT is off topic on this thread.
Tom. Polite please.
Sorry, temporary red haze...
I will make a determined effort to be more conciliatory and gentle in future or just think it.... I value the calmness and civility that pervades here most of the time - apologies for lowering the tone.
"I, like probably every other traveller, has noticed how often windmills are seen to be idle. "
If they are like the windmills in Washington State the wind primarily blows in the middle of the night when demand is non-existant.
Our local hydro and grid operater has 18 GW of hydrodams it manages and figures it can load balance 3 GW of windmills.
Unfortunately, do to the 'time of day' issue(mostly nights) or after a heavy rain, with only 3 GW of windmill on the grid the hydro dams end up going as 'slow as they can go' without killing the fish or overflowing. Then if we still have too much electricity at 3 AM the windmills are issued 'do not generate' orders.
Of course all of this will be corrected with a smart grid and smart appliances. Instead of all that wind energy being wasted at 3 AM none of our appliances will work when the wind isn't blowing. Our new 'futuristic' smart homes will automatically wake us up whenever the wind blows and unlock our appliances so we can do things like cook food and watch TV at the time approved by our energy masters instead of being the eco-criminals we are and doing things like eating when we are hungry and watching TV during 'peak load'.
Jan 2, 2011 at 9:27 PM |Tom
I'd really, really like to be kinder - and I suppose ignoring this silliness would be the easy way but - but if you really don't know - STFU
Tom
Page 31 and 32 of this brochure explain fault conditions that can be accommodated:
http://www.enercon.de/p/downloads/EN_Eng_TandS_0710.pdf
I believe active power/reactive power/no power can be fed into a short circuit. Because frequency matching is via electronic feedback and can be actively controlled Grid outages caused by Nuclear generator scram, such as happened in may 2008 when the frequency fell to 48.8Hz, can be actively tracked - difficult in a mechanical system.
A wind turbine like this can actually help a grid recover from a fault.
I respectfully refer you to the T&D book
On the subject of wind turbine efficiency it is interesting to see what the British Wind Energy Association (now renamed Renewable Uk) has to say on the subject in their Technical FAQs.
http://www.bwea.com/ref/faq.html#efficient
< How efficient are wind turbines?
The theoretical maximum energy which a wind turbine can extract from the wind blowing across it is just under 60%, known as the Betz limit. However the meaning of efficiency is a redundant concept to apply to wind energy, where the fuel is free. The primary concern is not the efficiency for its own sake, but to improve productivity in order to bring the price of wind energy down.
People often confuse efficiency with intermittency, for more information see our factsheet on intermittency.>
Nice to know their technical integrity is secure.
I guess the publication date is 1997 (or is it 1950?) so some 13 - 60 years old.
The Enercon system is electronic. DC rectified output from the generator is fed to a chopping circuit to provide 50/60Hz with/without phase lead or lag. I'm not shure the electronics were up to this 13 years ago and certainly would not have been considered for a 350MW generator.
I will not be paying $250-$1000 for a book of this age!
Perhaps you could show the bit which claims that turbines cannot continue providing power into a s/c?
Thanks
Ok Tom
I have found someone with a copy of the book, Would you care to point out the page which shows enercon to be telling untruths.
A quick scan shows no electronics as expected. Much talk of faults though!
- OK -
- white flag -
- non sequitur overload -
- disconnect -
Tom You criticised my statement about electronic grid connection being able to provide power to ride through a short circuit. You brought up the ABB power book as something I should read to correct my statements.
Are you saying you cannot provide a reference for this now I have bothered getting access to a copy.
Please point out the chapter that will debunk Enercon's brochure.
Fordprefect
I fear that you are slipping into old age.
you used to run a better line than that.
Oh well, we all have to go some time.
comiserations.
Fordprefect on a more serious note; you wrote:
QUOTE The theoretical maximum energy which a wind turbine can extract from the wind blowing across it is just under 60%, known as the Betz limit. However the meaning of efficiency is a redundant concept to apply to wind energy, where the fuel is free. The primary concern is not the efficiency for its own sake, but to improve productivity in order to bring the price of wind energy down.
UNQUOTE
This is the first time that I have read that the primary concern for wind energy is not effeciency but to improve productivity in order to bring its cost down.
How can you improve procuctivity without improving effeciency?
To my mind the two concepts are interwined.
But what is the purpose of wind energy production when by its nature you cannot rely on the wind?
Can it ever be anthing but a middle class toy?
A sort of Nero's fiddle to play with and to distract the votors, while the UK runs out of electricity.