Bishop Hill MacKay's dilemma
Dec 8, 2013 Energy: wind 
Christopher Booker's piece on windfarm policy this morning visits old ground for BH readers, namely Gordon Hughes' report on the deterioration of wind turbine performance over time. There is, however, an important bit of information towards the end of the article:
I gather that Prof Hughes showed his research to David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who could not dispute his findings. So DECC is fully aware of this devastating flaw in its projections, but presses on with its insane policy regardless.
Now we know that MacKay knows that windfarm performance is likely to deteriorate significantly over time, it will increasingly difficult for DECC to hold to their current course. If they do then question marks will surely be raised over the integrity of those involved - both ministers and civil servants.
That said, I hear on the grapevine that the cuts to onshore windfarm subsidies announced last week are marginal and unlikely to affect investor behaviour. So while the government have led us to believe that they are changing their tune on onshore wind, it is likely that this was in fact just an attempt to pull the wool over the public eyes.
That being the case, I hold out little hope that the new estimates of turbine performance will affect DECC's behaviour. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see if they incorporate these figures in their cost estimates and then plough on regardless or if they try to bluff it out and pretend that Hughes is wrong.
Reader Comments (73)
Damn and blast - earlier comment should have read 'forces us to use "LESS" electricity' - check before posting.
Alexander K - cousins living in NZ, so visit sporadically when funds allow, and love your country. Just because you have a smaller population does not make it ok to despoil with wind turbine (in my opinion) - just because you don't hear a tree fall doesn't mean it hasn't fallen. A planning inspector recently dismissed a planning application in an AONB and commented that just because the proposal wasn't visible from a public footpath didn't make the despoilation of the AONB any less damaging. For once, a planning inspector I agree with.
Anyone who saw the Danish serial Borgen on BBC4 will have been amused/irritated by the writer's dodging a couple of bullets.
The former PM heroine embarrassed herself on TV because she couldn't explain how higher Green costs for industry won't mean higher prices - because she hadn't read the briefing paper which would have explained how. (yes, right) And we never found out what miracles were in the paper. Surprise, surprise.
Her party was also going to make wind power more practical by...erm... setting up an institute to make wind power more practical.
I'm not making this up.
Has anyone seen this paper?
A Cost Benefit Analysis of Wind Power
It's a doctoral thesis - so heavily peer-reviewed. It's an academic paper, so non-political. And it clearly shows that when you connect enough wind farms to a grid to produce around 20% of the demand, the cost benefit becomes zero. This is because the wind farms cause the other generators to cycle so much that their loss of efficiency equals the energy the wind farms put out.
Beyond 20%, attaching more wind power produces NEGATIVE benefits. It actually costs you more in wasted fuel on the rest of the system than the fuel saving the wind farms are producing. In other words, if you turned off the wind farm you would be generating the same amount of energy on the grid using less fuel overall for less cost.
The 20% figure is shown by worked examples on the Irish Grid. The paper shows that with theoretical ideal best assumptions (not achievable in practice) you may be able to connect 30% wind to a grid, and with worst assumptions 5% before the cost benefit goes negative.
I wonder why this is not better known. Since Eleanor Denny got her doctorate for it, it will be hard to poke holes in the paper without poking holes in the assembled academic capability of Trinity College, Dublin....
Whoops! The link above is malformed, and there's no edit or delete on this site.
Either knock the extra 'br/' off the end, or use this correct link:
A Cost Benefit Analysis of Wind Power
Dodgy Geezer.
Yes more than 20% wind without energy storage may actually increase carbon emissions. We should call for a moratorium on further wind farms until energy storage is solved.
Fine you say – all we need to do is to develop energy storage for renewables to iron out the intermittency. Note that this energy storage problem has already existed for 50 years. The UK builds twice the number of power stations that it actually needs simply to insure that the lights never go out on the coldest day in winter. We would already be saving billions if there was a simple solution to energy storage, but unfortunately there isn’t. The scale of the problem for large wind deployment is an order of magnitude worse.
Furthermore running gas power stations in such a rapid stop and start mode is extremely wasteful in fuel. The efficiency falls fast. Leo Smith shows that the costs rise rapidly and that CO2 emissions also rise in the same way that driving a car through stop-go traffic increases fuel consumption. A grid with 50% load met by wind and 50% met by gas would cost over 3 times the current price for electricity and would lead to increased CO2 emissions. An analysis of these effect by an electrical engineer Leo Smith can be found here.
Basic Deployment Costs from [1]:
Gas: 6.2p per KWh
Onshore Wind: 12.5p per KWh
Offshore Wind: 37.6p per KWh
Nuclear 8p per KWh
EXTRA fuel costs incurred by WIND-GAS cooperation 6-9p per KWh more than doubling the cost of gas.
Beyond 20%, attaching more wind power produces NEGATIVE benefits.....
....I wonder why this is not better known......
Dec 9, 2013 at 12:59 AM | Unregistered CommenterDodgy Geezer
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DG, such things are certainly better known by readers at Bishop Hill. I have learned more from contributors here about how a national electric grid works than I have about anything else. The effect on national electricity supply of the windy green dream machines is, to borrow a phrase, even worse than I thought.
Mckay is just another public-sector teat-sucker. he simply does not dare to point out that the policies in his department are ruinous. He wants a public-sector index-linked pension. Time-server. Hypocrite. Whatever.
Dodgy Geezer, thanks very much for drawing our attention to that study. I for one will be sending it out to the movers and shakers of the blogosphere, and hopefully others will do the same.
And to author Eleanor, if she is reading - you go, girl! (as Judy Curry would say).
michael hart "I wonder why this is not better known....."
It's not for want of trying, I can assure you. Booker and Delingpole have covered it. I have presented the arguments at numerous wind farm public inquiries. Planning Inspectors are afraid to acknowledge it as it would set a precedent that would kill off the wind industry in this country. The Government and DECC don't want it to be known, as it would show that they have wasted billions of pounds, ruined countless lives and cost thousands of jobs, all because they pursued wind policy by believing green idiots and not carrying out due diligence before embarking on the policy.
Just to add one other factor to Phillip's explanation - all three main political parties (and all four in Scotland) have been run by and advised by scientific and engineering illiterates, so the obvious questions haves never been raised at PM question time:
Is the Prime Minister aware that once the contribution from wind energy reaches 10% of the national electricity demand, grid stability problems become acute and brownouts and blackouts will likely result?
Is the Prime Minister aware that once the contribution from wind energy reaches 10-15% of the national electricity demand, grid balancing requires that Gas power stations consequently be run on such an intermittent and inefficient basis that the resulting overall CO2 emissions are higher than they would be if we had no wind turbines?
A few points about the Denny paper:
1..And to author Eleanor, if she is reading - you go, girl! ..
Indeed she is so doing. She is currently an Assistant Professor at TCD, and last year won the inaugural European Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Her paper is a model of clarity...
2...Leo Smith shows that the costs rise rapidly and that CO2 emissions also rise in the same way that driving a car through stop-go traffic increases fuel consumption...
The Smith paper is certainly useful, but the Denny paper seems to me to have a number of advantages. It provides a comprehensive worked example of an actual grid with real data, it covers and costs every aspect, including forecasting accuracy, and predates the Smith work by several years. It is also arguably completely politically independent, and heavily peer-reviewed, so it cannot be simply rejected as erroneous...
... Booker and Delingpole have covered it...
I do not follow all their articles closely, but I have never seen them cover this particular paper. The fact that wind power has inefficiencies has certainly been mentioned, but ignored by the government. often on the grounds that these assertions are just propaganda. I think that the heavy academic background of this paper should make it hard to overlook...
Marginally off-topic (well, not really) - The Sunday Times has an article this week about the 'work' of a Planning Inspector called Paul Griffiths.
Since 2009 he has, apparently, approved 19 out of 22 cases which he has heard. Bear in mind, that these are appeals by the developers where the application was REFUSED by local Planning Officers.
This includes a decision to allow six 415ft high turbines near the site of the Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire (not, it has to be said, the windiest county in the British Isles)...
Objectors have reached the stage where they realise, having perhaps spent thousands of pounds on their case, if the appeal goes before Inspector Griffiths, they've lost.
This is all despite Eric Pickles' toothless 'Localisation' guidance...
So - this man appears single-handedly to be ruining the British Countryside - where is the Aarhus Convention on Human Rights when you need it..?
There are lots of things Prof MacKay knows, but hasn't managed to get across at DECC. He isn't averse to letting his views be known.
Examples (1) He considers solar PV in N.W.Europe to be a complete waste of money (2) He knows all about the problems of wind intermittency and considers it to be a major problem, never mind marginal diminution of turbine efficiency over time (3) He has a model showing just how far from 'carbon neutral' large scale biomass can be, which is being suppressed by DECC (see Private Eye issue 1348).
On the other hand he has had some successes, e.g. insisting (against political pressure) that the basic DECC '2050 Pathways' calculator includes costs as well as CO2 impact.
Just ask him. He's not shy about telling you when he is at loggerheads with his own government department.
Dec 9, 2013 at 8:53 AM | Registered Commenter lapogus
Your two points are excellent and very succinct. I have posed your two questions to my MP to ask of the relevant Minister (I know, groan, they will go to Ed Davey)
But note: my MP must ask these questions of the Minister. I am one of his constituents. If he doesn't ask, he is in dereliction of his duty. And UKIP is looming in the wings...with a far more coherent energy (and taxation) policy.
I urge people to keep asking their MP's to put these questions to the relevant ministers.
@ Clive, appreciate it if you could plonk your comment above on the thread at Parasitic wind killing its host which has got legs and a good discussion going. In particular I'm interested in the provenance of the prices you quote. Not that I doubt them, but Big Brother seems to have other ideas. Also on same thread a discussion about the real cost of nuclear that I'm really not qualified to judge.
I appreciate Nic Lewis's source, but anyone with any degree of real world engineering feel have always had issues with the claims of the life of windmills.
There is no solution to huge masses swinging around at varying speeds, on top of a column that flexes, under a force that varies constantly over the area of operation.
It is just basic physics. Resonant frequencies. Fatigue. Just wear and tear.
The may reduce the effects by having some clever "counter-rotating". They improve the the ability to exchange parts.
The technology is not going to make some giant leap forward. The technology is 100s of years old.
And this line about technology will dramatically improve life cycles is just green wash.
Dear Bishop,
Christopher Booker did not check his facts: Booker asserts that
"David MacKay ... could not dispute [Hughes's] findings", but this is poppycock. You can find a technical report I wrote, pointing out a significant flaw in Hughes's analysis here or here. Another paper is about to come out in a peer-reviewed journal, by Iain Staffell and Richard Green, which does the analysis properly, combining wind data with weather data. There is a decline in wind farm output, but it is much smaller than Hughes asserted.
David MacKay
Thanks for responding David Mackay,
Your paper shows roughly a 2% annual decline in load factor for on-shore wind farms. So after 10 years of operations we can expect load factors to decline from 0.3 to o.25. If I remember correctly Hughes also showed data from Danish off- shore turbines which had worse degradation than on-shore due to the harsher conditions at sea and maintenance costs will consequently be far higher.
Perhaps more important for UK energy policy is -
The PhDs thesis of Eleanor Denny Which shows that unless a solution for energy storage can be found wind power should never be allowed to exceed 20% of installed capacity. Otherwise more gas is burned balancing wind intermittency than if there is no wind at all. Cost benefit goes negative > 20% intrusion on the existing grid.
David M,
On off chance that you call back here, I've been trying to get to the bottom of controls on electricity prices in the UK - no easy task! This DECC source, Chart 3 appears to show onshore wind and offshore wind at similar costs in 2013. I believe it is a simple mistake - but highly misleading.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223940/DECC_Electricity_Generation_Costs_for_publication_-_24_07_13.pdf
And table 6 shows the levelised costs of wind falling with time, despite the "fact" that the cost of turbines seems only ever to have gone up
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/Cost+Methodologies
And the cost of ccgt rises only slowly with time, despite meteoric recent rises in gas price - I guess this depends on the outcome of shale gas in N America and UK.
Best, Euan
Three things:
- in response to Euan - thanks for the query about Chart 3 in the DECC document; I will look into it.
- about the Danish assertions from Hughes, those are based on the same analysis method that I discuss in my paper; the method is flawed, so you can't trust those conclusions. What's needed is better analysis carefully taking into account the weather.
- and on that last point, I should emphasise that my rough analysis of the data doesn't incorporate weather data - the definitive paper to look out for (coming out soon) is by Staffell and Green. In that paper, they combine the valuable data collated by the REF with NASA weather data to estimate farm by farm performance decline rates. They find there is evidence of a decline in performance in many of the farms (especially in the older farms for which there is more data), but the decline rates are much smaller than Hughes's flawed analysis suggested.
Talking of weather impacts - please can somebody point me to the source of the current output of the London Array? (ie as currently driven in the real world by a real weather system.)
I'd also appreciate it if anybody knows of a source for an up-to-the-moment Joule sum of output by individual windfarm installation from date of commission.
@ David M, I've not followed the details of this thread, but it should be clear that trend in wind farm load with time must take into account trends in wind and trends in operational up time for the turbines - which is the point I believe you are making. Our "weather" or "climate" whatever you want to call it is to some significant extent controlled by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which has "switched" from predominantly positive in the period 1980 to 2000 to predominantly negative since 2000. Anemometry data collected from the positive phase will not be applicable to wind farms operating in the negative phase.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/teleconnections/nao-f-pg.gif
not banned yet - I doubt if you'll get it. if you go onto the webswite of any of these wind farms (London Array; Greater Gabbard etc) you get lots of pretty pictures of wind turbines; much guff about how many homes they will 'power'; pictures of Michael Fallon unveiling a plaque, etc etc. - but not a peep about how much they're actully producing.
You'd think they'd be shouting it from the rooftops, wouldn't you..?
If you find anything, please post a link...!