Bishop Hill Missing the point?
Sep 26, 2012 Climate: WG3 Energy: wind There is lots of excitement among greens this morning over an article by Mark Lynas, which purports to show that wind farms do not increase carbon emissions.
From analysing National Grid data of more than 4,000 half-hour periods over the last three months, a strong correlation between windiness and a reduction in gas-fired generation becomes clear. The exchange rate is about one for one: a megawatt hour of wind typically meant the UK grid used one less megawatt hour of gas-derived electricity. This means that actual CO2 savings can be calculated from the data with a high degree of accuracy – these are not guesstimates from models, but observations of real-world data.
Over a year, based on the amount of electricity wind is currently generating each day, wind turbines save around 6.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide, or about 4% of the UK's emissions from electricity (based on CCGT plants emitting around 350 kg CO2 per mWh). This figure provides independent confirmation for the trade body RenewableUK's estimate of a current reduction in annual emissions from the entire UK wind fleet of about 6m tonnes.
I haven't had a chance to go through this thoroughly, but at first glance the article appears to be entirely risible. The wind-sceptic argument is that efficiency losses in gas-fired generators offset (perhaps more than offset) any emissions savings from wind. So to show that wind power replaces gas-fired generation on a one-to-one basis is completely irrelevant seems to miss the point - it is a statement of the patently obvious, since supply (we hope) has to meet demand.
The question that needs to be addressed is that of the efficiency of the gas-fired generation that is still operating.
Or am I missing something in Lynas's argument?
Reader Comments (127)
Lynas
I think many of us here are engineers or scientists, not historians. Most of us understand the operation of the (ancillary services) response and reserve markets well enough to kow that the majority of it is supplied by part-loaded coal and pumped storage, not the interconnectors (most of which are DC). If coal is retired, its share will have to be covered by CCGT and OCGT. Between 1980 and 1990 it was covered entirely by Dinorwig. The ancillary market is scaled between 1.5 GW (summer) and 0.9 GW (winter) to protect against present plant/demand failures and is managed by NGT (1990s provision charge was £250m pa). It is not scaled to accommodate wind variability nor intermittancy. Wind generation will soon require augmentation of this market with additional costs and increased emissions from part-loaded plant or OCGTs. With your new-found contacts in NGT I suggest it might be time to encourage them to do some total system studies (which only they can do) of grid operations with increasing wind generation so that they can then 'have a clue'.
Marl Lynas come out from hiding.
Lynas when you was inside the National Grid Building did you have to leave your Custard Pies at the G4S security desk.
Was you scoping the place out for a Green Peace protest.
All the paper demonstrates is that, despite all the £billions invested, the contribution of wind to the UK grid is so small that it falls within normal demand noise. That's why the Dutch paper cited by Matt Ridley is more convincing. They have much more wind-generated power to deal with. Oh, and the 20-odd coal-fired power stations the Germans are building to bring their energy prices back from the stratosphere.
Ben is correct when he says "its calls for £200bn investment in the grid". National Grid's profits are linked to its investment. National Grid is not concerned about keeoing the lights on. It is concerned about supporting the need for grid expansion to keep its profis rising; and wind power will need lots of grid investment. Mark Lynas' faith in a grid operator's statements is very touching and revealing.
Why do Mark Lynas & Chris Goodall continue to ignore the simplest, clearest, easiest-to-verify error in their article - the fact that they stated CCGT plants' emissions were 350 kg CO2 per mWh, when they're only 183.6 kg CO2 per mWh?
http://www.carbontrust.com/media/18223/ctl153_conversion_factors.pdf
Their silence is deafening.
[snip] I've just found their Guardian article and they don't seem to have allowed for changes in actual demand. Perhaps as a consequence, their fit between expected gas generation and wind generation has an R^2 of 0.24. They might like to note what Wikipedia has to say on the subject of R^2:
"The least-squares fitting process produces a value – r-squared (r2) – which is the square of the residuals of the data after the fit. It says what fraction of the variance of the data is explained by the fitted trend line. [. . .] In a method for identifying a statistically meaningful trend, only filtered or unfiltered series with r2 values exceeding 0.65 are counted as positive test results."
Consequently, I think their conclusions are not worth the paper they're written on - but then, it was the Guardian.
While I don't agree with their reasoning, I want to thank Mark Lynas for coming here to try and argue his corner. Needless to say it contrasts markedly with the usual response from the CAGW crowd (and their trolls), and is very welcome indeed.
As a scientist (geochemist) I beg zed for forgivness, I don't know anyone in my dept who is a climate scientist, otherwise I would go ask them. Out of 80 faculty and 160 odd phds, with almost everyone working on research probably somewhat related to the climate, none are climate scientists. Otherwise I would get you an answer.
So no, I dont agree.
Does anybody know of a good argument for switching to wind and increase our vulnerability to the weather in a world where we're told the weather and the wind are going to become increasingly more erratic and prone to extremes?
Lynas' "savings" are imaginary, because he has only used calculated CO2 emissions from the gas plants running at maximum efficiency. Because - unfortunately - the UK CO2 emissions are not metered like in Ireland there is no way to even estimate the actual CO2 emissions in the half-hour periods Lynas has taken into account.
Another point is that it is quite wrong to only look at CO2 emissions "saved" by the windmill contributions. Since the wind energy output is sometimes zero for long periods, 100% backup must be in place. An example of a period with no wind energy output is from 4 - 11 August 2012. The average wind power over 7 days was about 300MW, which is less than 6% of the installed UK wind energy capacity.
This means that 100% backup always must be available to satisfy demand. When base load plus backup generators cannot operate at maximum efficiency, they will produce more CO2 than is necessary. This must be taken into account in the total energy vs. emission balance.
Because base load plus 100% backup must be always available, wind power is an add-on provided at extra cost. Therefore all costs and emissions of wind energy plant operation must be taken into account in the balance; this includes the lifecycle cost and emission of installation, maintenance and replacement. Since the lifecycle of onshore windmills is only 12 - 15 years, these emissions and costs are considerable. For offshore is not yet clear, but the lifecycle cost wil probably be much higher than for onshore wind plant.
In 2011 the wind energy contribution to the UK grid was only 4%. With such small contributions the CO2 savings are negligible, for very high capital and maintenance cost. In this scenario OCGT is not yet necessary (OCGT function can be provided by CCGT). For higher contributions this will become even worse, because then the backup (also OCGT) really must come into play, significantly decreasing CO2 savings per MWh. If backup is insufficient, there will be serious grid problems like now in Germany.
Philip Bratby - National Grid's profits are linked to its investment. National Grid is not concerned about keeoing the lights on.
The other interesting thing about the £200bn 'need' for investment over the next decade is how it compares to consumption. Annual electricity sales about to around £29bn. It's inconceivable that spending 2/3 of turnover on 'upgrades' won't massively increase prices, even at 0% interest on the capital. That much money, per year, could buy 48GW of advanced CCGT capacity (according to the prices at http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/beck_plantcosts/ -- I.e. 231 x 210MW plants @ $139m per plant).
Philip Bratby has got it right.This article is a confidence trick using displaced capacity assuming no change in efficiency of the residual fossil-fuelled plant.
I suspect that the shades are falling rapidly from the eyes of the apparatchiks in DECC and the EU.
First of all, welcome to Bishop Hill Mr Lynas and Goodall,
I too discuss these issues with the National Grid and I think you are ignoring several problems here. Straight from the horses mouth as it were, in the winter of 2010/11 we would have probably had black outs across the country due to peak demand coinciding with a large high pressure system sitting over the UK while the country was snowbound. The happy coincidence that prevented this from happening was the economic recession reducing demand. Wind energy is not much more than useless eco-bling if it cannot help meet our peak power demands.
The carbon accounting of wind energy remains in its infancy and no reliable attempt has been made at estimating the embedded and operational carbon emissions associated with the need for back up generation and running thermal plant at lower efficiencies than would be the case without wind power. Our current installed wind of 7GW is causing problems that we have coped with so far, but 30GW will create an entirely different scale of problem. I note in your comments that you agree that further increases in installed wind will take us into unknown territory.
We also need to remember the thermal restraints of electricity transmission. If wind fluctuates across the country we cannot simply adjust output from one CCGT to balance the network but need to geographically spread the change across the grid by asking generators to change their contracted generation. That is expensive since the generators are commercial entitieswho can charge two or three times the going rate for the unscheduled changes to their generation plans which are set months in advance. I was quoted £140 per MWh this week compared to the market value of closer to £50. That's another cost that should be added to the real price of wind generation.
I' agree that we save some fossil fuel energy by deploying wind generation at the moment, but it isn't a 1 for 1 exchange and the fraction we save will almost certainly be reduced as we increase the installed capacity of wind.
The best way to reduce emissions is to develop shale gas and build a new fleet of CCGTs to replace coal plants. Alternatively we can keep increasing the price of energy to reduce economic output and deepen the recession thus further reducing demand . The latter scenario has been the most significant consequence of our renewables policy and the FIT to date.
The IPCC 'consensus' is based on a scientific howler. The claim in the 'energy Budget' that the Earth emits IR as an isolated black body in a vacuum is based on adding 'back radiation' to net UP IR, equivalent to replacing UP-DOWN IR with UP-DOWN+DOWN IR, breaching Poynting's theorem, the most basic axiom of radiation physics. Fix the IR physics and there can be no CO2-AGW.
Our scientific establishment should hang its head in shame for failing to identify this.
I averaged the data from the UK grid. Wind averaged 1200MW. And the max was around 4GW.
But there were over 3000 5 minute periods where wind went under 100MW in the last year or so.
Zed and follow-ups removed
http://www.scotsman.com/business/millions-paid-out-as-energy-is-wasted-1-2543212
SCOTTISH wind farms were paid more than £500,000 compensation in a single day after a “record” amount of energy was wasted because the grid lacked the capacity to use it. The Renewable Energy Foundation has reported that on 14 September wind farms in Scotland were paid around £580,000 by the National Grid for reducing output by about five gigawatts after the system reached its maximum limit.
However, the National Grid reportedly denied it was a record, raising the possibility that it might not be the first time that so much energy has gone to waste.
So when the wind blows the power goes nowhere and they still get get paid.
"The IPCC 'consensus' is based on a scientific howler."
Do you know what AlecM? We have two other posters on this blog who believe the same thing as you do. One calls himself mydogsgotnonose and the other is spartacus. Amazingly they use exactly the same words as you do, and repeat the same story about everyone having it wrong except them, and of course, you.
You are either garnering a faithful band of followers, or, mysteriously, you are changing your identity in some bizarre belief that you'll fool us into believing we have different people rabbitting the same thing on every post on the blog.
Now deal with the wind farms issue.
Lord Beaverbrook said it, but let's say it again more succinctly. As we have managed to maintain a stable grid for decades before we had wind (barring power cuts for the miners strike, which I lived through), why should we pay extra and vastly over the odds on a MWh-for-MWh basis for an add-in (wind) that destabilises the grid. That is just senseless!
I am sure I can't be alone in being utterly bamboozled by this debate when, by any rational reckoning, it is clearly nonsense from start to finish.
Turn it on its head, if you will. Imagine that conventional power generation required back-up from wind power. Nobody would entertain such a laughable notion.
Yet Lynas and Co. would have us believe that the opposite – conventional back-up for wind power at times when there is too much/too little wind – is acceptable, even desirable as the cost of each, they would have us believe, is the same.
All of which ignores the bleedingly obvious point that if you already have a system of producing electricity, whether by using coal, gas or nuclear energy, that not merely works but has become progressively more efficient and cheaper, why would anyone with even half a brain want to propose an alternative system – to wit, windmills – that are vastly more expensive, probably increase CO2 emissions and are inherently unreliable?
It is, seriously, loony tunes stuff.
Had I been born in the 16th century, I am sure that I would have marvelled at the ingenuity of the Dutch in harnessing wind-power to drain low-lying land, just as I would have marvelled that Ferdinand Magellen was able to circumnavigate the globe similarly using wind-power. But that anyone in the 21st century should maintain that an industrial economy can be powered by what to all intents and purposes is a medieval technology is not merely perverse, it's demented.
It's akin to suggesting that a 747 be powered by steam engines: possible no doubt but ludicrously inefficient and insanely expensive.
Simon:
Nail. Head. Hit.
And very succinctly put.
Capell:
"The least-squares fitting process produces a value – r-squared (r2) – which is the square of the residuals of the data after the fit. It says what fraction of the variance of the data is explained by the fitted trend line. [. . .] In a method for identifying a statistically meaningful trend, only filtered or unfiltered series with r2 values exceeding 0.65 are counted as positive test results."
Except if your name is Michael Mann and you are waving a hockey stick, in which case r2=0.02 will do very nicely.
Mark Lynas makes a tiny tiny point about wind power which is an infinitesimally small part of the wind power debate which itself is a small part of the energy debate which is part of the climate change debate which now seems to be just a small part of the sustainability debate.
What a great shame that he could not win even that tiny tiny argument.
AIUI the point being advanced by Mr Lynas (and +1 to the props for coming here) is - paraphrasing loosely - that the amount of usable wind power we've got, and the amount of reserve fossil capacity we've got, are about the same, most of the time. Therefore, there is no incremental CO2 from having wind plus a standby supply, because the standby supply is not there because of the wind. It is there because you've got to have it in reserve anyway, in case a major conventional plant fails.
If that's the gist of the argument, I have no trouble accepting all that. It does raise two issues though.
One is that the usefulness of wind would appear to be limited by scale. That is, it's fine to the extent of whatever reserve capacity you've got anyway. But what happens if you want twice as much wind, or ten times as much? At that point you haven't got gas-fired reserve capacity - so don't you have to build it? If so, the sceptic position is basically intact and needs only to be slightly restated. Wind is practical only as long as it is deployed on a trivial scale; but if it's trivial then why bother?
The second observation is whether on any scale wind is good value for our carbon abatement dollar. Why do I want to build windmills at enormous cost when, for the same money, I could abate vastly more carbon by building X times as many power stations fuelled by fracked gas?
Thoughts anyone?
My understanding of OCGT & CCGT is that the latter routes the hot exhaust from an OCGT through a boiler, producing steam, and driving an additional turbine generator. Hence the considerable improvement in overall efficiency - PROVIDED that it is running at, or close to, full load. This would agree with what Mark Lynas is claiming above under the present scenario of a fairly modest contribution of wind.
But, as others have pointed out, when you have a situation like that in Germany, the ramping up and down needed to balance the grid becomes very substantial. Perhaps Mark would like to ask his contacts to provide some quantifiable figures showing the overall efficiency of a typical CCGT at loads small enough to stop the boiler from producing steam. At this point it IS an OCGT, and short of some magic, won't have anything like the 50+% efficiencies claimed by him.
I think our scientists and engineers are enjoying debating the detail of Mark's points and ignoring the bigger picture, as Lord Beaverbrook and others point out; any wind turbine built is by definition a duplicate of existing generating capacity, it can not stand alone. In economic terms wind power is superfluous and a waste of money.
In the end this argument has to come back to CO2, without the false need to reduce CO2 nobody in his or her right mind would consider wind power.
If I follow our engineers into the detail; if we have "spinning reserve" available for emergencies and currently that spinning reserve is covering the variability of wind, does that mean we are reducing our ability to react to a genuine emergency?
I'm not in favour of censorship, but please delete ZDB's comments. There is an interesting debate going on here, apart from some invective, and the last thing we need is the usual intervention by this irritant.
I'm sure all those unfortunate Chinese, living with lakes of stinking, poisonous pollution from the extraction of rare-earths for wind turbine magnets, will be cheered to hear that, as a result of their privations, the UK's "carbon emissions" have not increased. Allegedly.
Mike Fowle. See 5.22pm and subsequently. I do need to eat occasionally.
On the matter of OCGT: If OCGT is not needed why is there some in the network? If you look at the BM Reports charts and scroll down to the bottom two charts you can see there is an OCGT component to the grid, it just doesn't get used.
On the matter of CO2 emissions: Leaving aside the issue of whether there is a need to reduce CO2 or not, why is the path chosen by our betters one of spending loads of money on windmills, the infrastructure to stand them on and wire them up to the grid and the cost of keeping conventional generation going as well to act as a reserve, when reductions in CO2 can be achieved merely by replacing coal power generation with gas as much as is practical?
J4R:
The capacity mechanism is being introduced by the Government to reward electricity suppliers for building gas-fired power stations which will only be run to back-up the increasing wind power capacity. Of course the consumer will pay through the nose for this dual system of these new gas-fired power stations as well as for the new wind power stations. I believe this capacity mechanism madness is being introduced across Europe.
Thank you, your grace. You may dine.
From across the pond, the worrying thing might be that a combination of intelligent load shedding, load distribution, construction of additional state-of-the-art generation capacity which would be run at partial loads to help pick up the losses due to windlessness might work in the beginning. And it might do it as Lynas suggests. The problem would surface when it quit being practical to build excess capacity into line-generation and the construction of pure stand-by generation was required. My guess is that generators which get used intermittently would be built to minimal cost and limited service life and would cost a LOT to operate - and likely be dirty as well.
I think you (and we) have to hope that the folly of this is realized despite the early efforts having "acceptable" numbers.
If it were my country, i would want all new generation built to the highest specification under the assumption that wind-power will be blown away as the fad it truly is. They like to say "all the rage" here.
Thanks to Lynas and Goodall coming by for the debate and to the Bishop for maintaining the venue...
Having read through the points I have to credit David S for making the most telling point - if power fluctuations from Downton Abbey and nuclear power plant down cycles are greater than wind generation - why do we need wind anyways? Add to that the increasing integration problems with higher wind power percentages (ask the Germans for their thoughts on this), the dodgy R^2 stats and the case argued by Lynas does not stand.
Re Sep 26, 2012 at 6:00 PM | Agouts
The Dutch don't use windmills anymore to drain low-lying land and to keep their polders dry. This is unreliable, expensive and it takes too many windmills and too much time. The Dutch went to steam more than 150 years ago and now have pumping stations, with sets of enormous electric centrifugal pumps, each churning out cubic metres per second. It is not in the interest of the Dutch to use only wind or solar power as a supply for these stations. It is essential to keep the pumps pumping, easily as important as keeping the lights on.
Sep 26, 2012 at 2:38 PM | Jamspid
Brilliant :)
Sep 26, 2012 at 6:56 PM | Justice4Rinka
If a major generating plant would fail, it is not certain there would be enough wind to compensate for the loss. Therefore it would be very unwise to think of wind as backup. Better to have extra gas plant, e.g. OCGT, that can be started up at a moment's notice. That is probably why the UK has it set up.
I'm out of my depth here but isn't there a huge opportunity cost attached to wind power?
I cannot find any mention of the term in association with wind power so as a decision making tool for investment purposes I assume it has been swept under the carpet as far as windmills is concerned.
Hi Geronimo: the IPCC 'consensus' is bu$$ered, no matter who says it. It's as I said, an astonishing failure of science and the windmill scam was what it was supposed to justify.
The windmills are a cross between The Windmill in 'Animal Farm', Easter Island Statues and the Swastika!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100007825/internet-bullies-arent-trolls-theyre-disgusting-cowards-besieging-our-culture-and-ruining-debate/
O/T but on the earlier matter of disruptive trolls; there is an article in today's Telegraph which says among other things
"I have ....been subject to the attentions of borderline online obsessives with impenetrable grudges. Almost anyone who dares to put forward a point of view can become subject to the attentions of these bullies. Writing this, will, no doubt encourage them – but as a society we must do more to speak out against the cowards who are besieging our culture and damaging our ability to debate.
From now on, I am removing “troll” from my vocabulary. It is too easy to apply the term to critics with genuine points and for those who are simply abusive; words like bully and coward are far more applicable."
@billy liar
You've hit the nail on the head with opportunity cost. Billions upon billions are spent on wind turbines and further billions for network upgrades to carry the power from all these mountain tops where the turbines live. And the usage of all the existing plant, the load factors, are reduced. On what balance sheet are all these costs appearing? Before wind came along, no utility would have ever over invested the way we are doing now.
"2W per m2"
Almost makes me pine for solar panels...
I think even more factors come into play. Windmills have gearboxes, and they are the weakest point of the entire contraption. In the Us, manufacturers of windmills have to provide guarantees about their performance. What they have devised to eliminate claims of failure, and reap the benefits of subsidies, is to provide windmill farms with programs to upgrade their engines after the period of warranty does expire with slightly more powerful engines, thus being able to have again the full subsidy of the (local) government, no liability due to lack of maintenance, And the costs are projected on the customers of these fantastically efficient generators of money.
It is a pyramid game, the like we have not seen.
I realise many posters are thoroughly enjoying their separate demolitions of Lynas et al, but the point that amazes me is this: returning to medieval sources of energy cannot be justified no matter how it is analysed or promoted. Lynas has form for promoting nonsense such as the fabled 'sinking' of the Seychelles, so 'discussing' this topic with him is wasted energy as he will not recognise good sense and physical reality when he is confronted with it but will continue to promote nonsense, thrilled to be taken seriously here.
The main problem has to do with the difference in economic models: wind has preferentially to be fed into the grid, at a bonus price, shutting down conventional capacity. Conventional capacity, which was installed with a steady production and related financing scheme, cannot cope with the long times of inactivity, whilst being in stand by for the case that wind does not supply. E-On has threatened to close two modern gas facilities on the basis that they are running idle 80% of the year, due to the massive penetration of wind and solar in the German market.
What wind, solar do is the following:
they lower the price of commercially available electricity when they can deliver.
They push out of the market the usual producers of electricity due to their preferential right to deliver what they can, at the exorbitant rates THEY can scrape from the consumers. This is what is called balancing? Replacing cheap electricity by for consumers extremely expensive electricity whilst the cheap generators are still running?
What happens is the following:
when wind comes to power, your electricity bill follows their expensive tariff, even though their electricity is for free. The difference is flowing into the investors and enablers of this hoax.
We are funding the bill of the wealthy
Mark and Chris:
I'd like to than thank you for making the effort to correct mistaken impressions being spread through skeptical websites like this one. I never really understood the argument that OCGT running in reserve to back up wind power would put out as much CO2 as a CCGT generating power in conventional mode. However, I've studied National Grid's "Operating in 2020" online reports and found REAL concerns you haven't addressed.
Nowhere in "Operating in 2020" does National Grid tell us how much less carbon dioxide will be emitted under their scenarios. Nowhere does it project how much this will cost. Why are such key figures missing from these documents? Some documents mention reducing "carbon intensity", but this parameter might be calculated on the basis of installed capacity, not average output and probably doesn't reflect reserve requirements. (I presume the answers will embarrass the government and anger National Grid's regulators and a highly-regulated utility doesn't need these problems. National Grid doesn't need to worry about angry customers because their have no recourse.)
Please look at Table 2 "Average Operating Reserve" (p 31) in the National Grid document titled "Update: Operating the Electricity Transmission Networks in 2020". The operating reserve (presumably fossil fuel plants emitting CO2) is scheduled to nearly double from 4800 (MW) today to 8100 MW in 2025 as an addition 25,000 MW (installed capacity) of wind power comes online. If the average output from wind is 25% of installed capacity, the average increase in wind output will be 6250 MW that will be backed up by 3300 MW of increased fossil fuel power operating in reserve and emitting CO2. On an average day, more than half of the CO2 emissions theoretically saved by wind power will actually be emitted from fossil fuel plants running in reserve.
Wind power varies with the third power of wind speed, so a 20% reduction in wind speed translates into a 50% drop in power output. Right now, National Grid assumes that wind output can decrease by 50% of forecast within any 4 hour period (p 30, item 6.30) and presumably has fossil fuel plants operating in reserve mode to replace that wind power. (Four hours appears to be the amount of time needed to bring a fossil fuel plant online). So, the actual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from wind power AFTER ACCOUNTING FOR RESERVE REQUIREMENTS is about half of the reduction anticipated without accounting for reserve requirements. Note that stronger the wind is predicted to blow; the larger the reserve must be. Fortunately, wind is such a small fraction of current capacity (and an even small fraction of average output) that the 50% reserve requirement is a modest fraction of the reserve needed for the system as a whole. National Grid is hoping that the reserve requirement can be narrowed to 30% of predicted output, meaning they hope to predict average wind speed within 13% 4 hour in the future with 99.7% reliability (today's reliability standard). Given the chaotic nature of weather, such improvements may not be possible.
See page 26-27 and 41 for a discussion of the problem of turbines shutting down because winds get too strong. The largest credible in-feed loss is expected to increase from 1320 to 1800 MW by 2014/5.
Interesting. Only I have a very curious question...
Why?
Why show only three days? And just what data goes into those three days?
Is that cherry pie in the picking? That combined with using massive data aggregation to show odd totals.
Did the area where gas/coal energy generation decline match up with the areas with access to wind generated electricity?
How does that chart look by day, with a year (or more) worth of data? Is that wind power only at 9:30 AM? Why do the totals at 9:30 AM anyway, what about 12 AM or PM?.
I am also curious about what is output, how and where it is measured?
Personally I think that article looks like a carefully crafted baffle them with BS article. Make people waste their time trying to figure out what is said, asking meta data questions that willl be ignored but the title and summation goes major duped media.
Always neglected is the amortization of the plant. In the normal course of events the operating cost per unit of whatever approximates to the amortization cost per unit of whatever. The explanation for this can be found in a reasonable text on engineering economics. Whether the gas fired plant is idle or the wind turbine is idle the amortization still has to be paid.
Dung says-
"If I follow our engineers into the detail; if we have "spinning reserve" available for emergencies and currently that spinning reserve is covering the variability of wind, does that mean we are reducing our ability to react to a genuine emergency?"
Yes indeed. Spinning reserve is strictly defined by federal regulating bodies, such as FERC and NERC here in the US. The size of the reserves have been carefully set to safely recover from several levels of grid contingencies. Adding erratic wind generation to the grid dramatically increases the likelihood of a problem, and requires adding more spinning reserves to maintain the same grid reliability as dictated by regulations. Wind generation is 100% guaranteed to create problems.
Of course, bureaucrats can always intervene to bypass or waive regulatory requirements. I am pretty sure this type of execrable behavior is in play right now.
The Texas electric utility operator ERCOT, with state of the art weather forecasts and several years of operating experience with multi-GW of installed wind at prime locations, limits next-day scheduling of wind energy to 9% of nameplate capacity.
Nick: "Now for a country with loads of hydro, wind is really quite attractive, when the wind blows you switch off the hydro and that means you have more water behind the dam for when the wind isn't blowing."
You would need infinite storage behind the dam for this to be true for all periods. Many hydropower reservoirs spill during spring snowmelt and/or during periods of wet weather. When a reservoir is spilling, shutting down the turbines so that the load can be take up by wind is not worthwhile.