“Measured annual energy production from the turbines averages 48 percent of that predicted by the models using the manufacturer’s published power curves,” Kelly Winder wrote in the Small Wind Turbine Performance Investigation report, which was distributed only to study participants.
That’s when they work.
Saskatchewan has a 24 meter hill…I did not know that….I did know these whirly gigs underpreform
If only they installed them on Parliament Hill and all Provincial capitals. The hot air emitted would keep them spinning forever.
Great blog, I have been pondering over a wind turbine. Thanks
The damnable conclusion:
>>> “He believes the turbine will eventually pay for itself, especially considering the incentives he received from the provincial and federal governments.”
Our Enemy, The State.
More at WUWT:
“The Futility of Wind Power
Posted on February 13, 2011 by John A
From Viv Forbes of Australia’s Carbon Sense Coalition comes this new document intended as “a submission to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms” on the extraordinary costs of wind power generation both economically and environmentally:
Wind power is so dilute that to collect a significant quantity of wind energy will always require thousands of gigantic towers each with a massive concrete base and a network of interconnecting heavy duty roads and transmission lines. It has a huge land footprint.
Then the operating characteristics of turbine and generator mean that only a small part of the wind’s energy can be captured.
Finally, when they go into production, wind turbines slice up bats and eagles, disturb neighbours, reduce property values and start bushfires.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/13/the-futility-of-wind-power/#more-33980
More:
Ontario Pharaoh Liberal McGuinty: E-gypt Me.
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi
Anyone gullible enough to think that wind mill hawkers or the foolish, venal, governments promoting them have the slightest credibility should rent “The Music Man” DVD as a first vital step to improve their thinking processes.
And that concrete has a large ‘carbon footprint’ too; and rare earth minerals are used in their manufacture (the blades IIRC) so they’re not even helping Gaia overall.
There’s an interesting catch phrase in the Producer article. It states that it only produces 48 per cent of what was predicted on the manufacturer’s power curve. This is NOT the same as capacity factor. It’s much less. It means that these things produce only 48 per cent of expected power at ALL wind speeds.
This has got to go down as the greatest snake-oil con-job of modern times. How people could bank on ANY government program and expect it to last forever, [we still have these things called elections folks] is stunning.
my mom hails from Pilot Butte…just outside Regina….i think a butte is a hill….one year during the 20’s the men dug a big hole outside of town…to be used as a swimming hole….
mom and her sisters threw up coming thru the rockies…
one christmas her and her sisters were given a piglet as a gift…they were allowed to take it to bed but for just one night.
they walked the railway tracks looking for coal…
their diet contained a lot of pyrogies….they had a root cellar…her grandparents lived in a hole dug in the ground with sod walls and a canvas roof when they started homesteading..German speaking gramps was from someplace ‘with a lot of Turks’ and gram was from Wien…they arrived here before Confederation..
& another bothersome fact…
“A red kite, one of approximately 1 million birds that die in Spain
every year because of collisions with wind turbines.”
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/wind-turbines-will-add-up-to-015-c-to.html
I about twenty years these windmills – those that are still standing – will be quaint tourist attractions that remind visitors of a bygone silly era.
“This has got to go down as the greatest snake-oil con-job of modern times. ”
Nope. This was pure and simple cut off my nose to spite my face stupid.
In order to “invest” in wind turbines you basically have willfully suspend belief in weather, energy system design, engineering and economics – all at the same time.
This was not sold to reasonble people, this was self inflicted mutilation by the insane.
Does anyone know what the capital cost recovery time line is if there is only a 48% of expected generation?
There’s no way to tell, Ken. It all depends upon the capital cost structure used to finance the construction in the first place. What I do know from utility practice, i.e. Hydro Quebec, is that the cost recovery for the Gaspe projects was supposed to be 10 years.
These projects generated at only 18% capacity factor in their first two years, about half of what they expected. They’ve not done much better since. So it would not be unreasonable to at least double the recovery estimate.
HQ doesn’t particularly care about this however. They are a trivial part of the HQ system. They were only built to include a modicum of green power in their exports to the US to get around the renewable content requirement that some US states have for imported electricity.
“He believes the turbine will eventually pay for itself, especially considering the incentives he received from the provincial and federal governments.”
That says it all, these won’t pay for themselves, taxpayers will.
btw, what do you suppose will happen when those “incentives” are withdrawn without warning?
ChrisinMB:
btw, what do you suppose will happen when those “incentives” are withdrawn without warning?
I’m just guessing, of course, but I feel safe in predicting this:
Lawsuits
Proving, once again, that government works magnificently as a make-work project for lawyers.
the issue is, as anyone who has studied these things in PRACTICE, is that the “how much power” curves are developed “in the lab”.
That is at 15mph wind they will develop x Kw.
Great at a constant wind of 15mph, with no turbulence…
Add gusting, changing wind direction, turbluence from ground and atmospheric events and the turbines, which exist in the real world and thus don’t instantaneously turn into the wind, speed up and slow, and don’t react well when blade A down near the ground is getting a back draft while blade C is getting a double shot of wind, aren’t as efficient with ice and water on them… aaaaand you have to derate the things a LOT.
“Average smooth air” is not equal to “REAL Averaged smoothed wind”
Sad REally.
NEVERMIND, that each kW of wind has to have a kW of spinning reserve waiting to take up the slack every moment.
Like I said to believe wind power is goign to replace ANYTHING except in exceptional situations you have to be willfully stupid and blind.
And Ontario Hydro used to be such a well managed and conservative ( in the we take no risks and assume the worse way, our job is reliability and cheapest kw/Hr) org too.
KevinB, now I vaguely recall such a thing happening in Australia (or UK?) awhile back.(I must have read it on SDA) Some farmers invested heavily in windpower, then the government program/subsidy abruptly ended, forcing many to loose their shirts. Lawsuits were the result…
Fred2 you neglected the bird chopping energy expenditure!
If the windmill was supposed to pay off its capital in ten years and it only put out half its advertised capacity, one would be tempted to believe that it would take twenty years to pay out. But.
The lifespan is LESS than 20 years. And we know that for certain.
http://www.techhui.com/photo/albums/kamaoa-wind-farm
When I was a boy in the forties,before rural electrification, there were numerous wind generators on the area farms.Windelectric,Jacobs and others.We even had a local machinist by the name of Austin Carefoot manufacture,patent and sell wind generators of a design that GE said wouldnt work.His satisfied customers proved them wrong.There were NO wind generators on poor farms.I have never been an admirer of Tommy Douglas but,in his defence,he said that the rural electrification of Sask.was as if not more important than medicare.Germany and Russia both knew that to advance the people out of abject living conditions,cheap electricity had to be available to all.
Another useful article, diminished somewhat by an author illiterate in science.
I quote: “The turbine, perched on a hill 24 metres above the nearby South Saskatchewan River, produced an average of 25 kilowatts of energy per day last month.
The three houses and shop on his farm used 95 kilowatts of energy per day.”
Energy is not measured in kiloWatts. Power is measured in kiloWatts. Power is the rate at which energy is being transformed from one state to another, e.g. from mechanical to electrical, or from electrical to heat. Electrical energy is measured in kiloWatt-hours, which is power integrated over time. Your electric power bill shows the power consumption in kW-hrs (unless they have switched to Joules, the better to confuse you).
Granted, it may be a nit-pick, but a failure to understand the crucial difference between power and energy is at the root of a whole lot of the nonsense being peddled by the watermelons.
@ spike 1, the farm we live on had two wind generators, one by the barn and one by the house. They were dismantled when rural electrification took place in this municipality.
Now they want to make electricity as expensive as possible in an effort to please some non existent man made climate change.
Ken, it’s not just climate change. That’s the excuse de jour, but it’s deeper than that. The current generation in power has been raised on the ideology that small is always good and big is always bad. Even if climate change didn’t exist as an issue, there would still be political push behind wind. Call it sustainable development or any other environmental catch phrase, it doesn’t matter.
Every province in Canada with thermal generation is having problems coming to grips with the need to replace aged infrastructure. None of them wants to do it. That’s why we have all this talk about microgeneration, distributed generation, smart grids and all the rest of it. The nature of electricity is that bigger is always 1. more reliable and 2. less costly.
Saskatchewan has been deferring any meaningful plans about replacing its coal plants with new ones for about 30 years now. BC has been deferring plans for Site C for at least that long even though it’s now a net importer of electricity. Manitoba has been delaying or canceling plans for Conawapa since the ’80s. Ontario has done nothing of consequence. And Quebec was stopped dead in its tracks on Grande Baleine in 1993 by Robert Kennedy Jr.
Politicians ALWAYS follow the path of least resistance.
gordinkneehill
“…….an author illiterate in science……]
Indeed. The watermelons are always illiterate in science…they lable their fantasys as science…..and assume that “alternative energy” just requires “political will”…..and have succeeded in inducing gullible politicians to implement fanciful projects….who in turn using “other peoples money” cavalierly have to abandon these white elephants.
cgh
[……..The nature of electricity is that bigger is always 1. more reliable and 2. less costly…..]
Microgeneration is like trying to drive a vehicle with 25-50 different small engines with no throttle control on most of them…..with the same results. Except we are talking thousands of different power sources…..not just 25-50.
During WW1 the British Whippet tank employed 2 engines, one for each track…..although the Whippet was the basis for the Mediums the independant engine idea was abandoned….multiple engines but not independantly throttled…
Sasquatch: “The watermelons are always illiterate in science…”
And we’ve yet to see a single exception.
Which is why Patrick Moore walked out on Greenpeace more than 30 years ago.
We might call this Sasquatch’s Law formulated thus:
“Acceptance of Green Principles lies in an inverse relationship to knowledge of basic science and engineering.”