Disadvantages and Advantages of Wind Turbines
by Enza Ferreri
There is much controversy about wind turbines in the UK. Let's try to analyze and understand the debate by listing their pros and cons.
Disadvantages of wind turbines:
- They are extremely unreliable, depending entirely on whether the wind blows with exactly the right strength or not.
The obvious fact is that the wind does not always blow at the same speed, and often it does not blow at all.
Wind companies, and easily deceived media and politicians, like to describe turbines in terms of capacity, which is their potential output if the wind were all the time blowing at the optimum speed (between 34 and 56 mph). This leads people to believe that a "2 megawatt wind turbine" should be relied on to always consistently generate 2MW.
In reality, due to the inconsistency of wind speed, the average output of a UK wind turbine is about 25% of its capacity: this ratio between potential and actual output is called "load factor".
Wind turbines let you down especially when there is most need for them, on cold winter days caused by high pressure systems that make winds drop to almost nothing, with not enough wind to generate electricity at all.
In December 2010, for instance, which was in Britain the coldest month in more than a century, with temperatures well below zero and soaring demand for electricity, most of the UK's 3,153 wind turbines in 283 wind farms were virtually still, working at less than one-hundredth of capacity, generating electricity for less than 30,000 homes in the whole of the country.
Far from this being an isolated case, this pattern is recurrent and was similar the previous winter, 2009, when high pressure brought freezing sub-zero cold temperatures, snow and no wind, and led to an even worse failure of wind power to generate electricity than in 2010. The National Grid, responsible for balancing the UK's supply and demand of energy, was forced to ask industry, its biggest users, to ration supplies.
Said John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation to the Daily Mail: "When you get a high pressure system at this time of year it can cover most of the UK. The whole of the UK is becalmed just when it gets really cold and when demand for electricity goes up."
"To be always ready to step in, the back-up has to be kept running all the time, even when the wind is blowing. The necessary back-up to wind farms is usually gas-fired or coal-fired so it emits carbon dioxide, meaning that the 'carbon savings' are derisory."
On the opposite end of the spectrum, if the wind is too strong turbines shut down.
In December 2011 Scotland experienced storms and strong winds during which one wind turbine caught fire and others automatically shut down to prevent damage from high winds. The power generation slumped by more than half from over 2,000 to 708 megawatts.
During the bad weather 105,000 Scottish homes lost their electricity supply, and 10,000 of them had not recovered it after a week.
This fundamental disadvantage of wind turbines, simply due to the vagaries of the wind, is not going to make any progress with the advancement of technology.
- Wind turbines are unpredictable.
In the case of the Scotland storms described above, for example, the turbine operators had predicted that the wind turbines would have functioned normally.
It is difficult to accurately predict how much power wind farms will generate.
As a consequence, to guarantee continuous electricity supply, other sources of power have to be permanently kept on "spinning reserve", ready to be activated at any moment to compensate for the lack of supply from the wind turbines.
To be always ready to step in, this back-up has to be kept running all the time, even when the wind is blowing. The back-up is usually gas-fired and less often coal-fired and oil-fired so emits carbon dioxide (CO2).
- Wind turbines are inefficient.
With the Climate Change Act 2008 the UK government, by its own description, "has passed legislation that introduces the world's first long-term legally binding framework to tackle the dangers of climate change." [Emphasis added]
It is an unprecedented piece of legislation, about which The Telegraph journalist Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster and co-author with Richard North of Scared to Death, says that it is:
"by far the most expensive law in history, which commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to reducing its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent in 40 years. By the Government's own estimates, this will cost up to £18 billion a year. Any hope that we could begin to meet such a target without closing down most of our economy is as fanciful as the idea that we can meet our EU commitment to generate 30 per cent of our electricity by 2020 from 'renewable' sources, such as wind and solar."
Kite Blowing in the Wind
Booker predicts that in a few years' time, when the ageing coal-fired and nuclear power stations that supply 40% of the British current electricity needs are forced to close, the country will suffer an "energy gap" between demand and supply of 40 percent, i.e will be left without 40% of the energy it needs for household and industrial use and to keep the economy alive in any form, and there is no plan in place to remedy this, since "renewables" are no adequate substitutes for oil, coal and gas.
Similarly, the Scientific Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute jointly published a report, Renewable Energy: Vision or Mirage, saying that the government's focus on renewable sources of energy is ill-advised.
The report argues that the UK plans for renewables are unrealistic and the renewable technologies are incapable of providing the secure energy supply that Britain needs.
It goes on to warn that, if current policies continue, the UK faces an energy crisis by the mid-2010s, saying:
"As renewable energy sources produce power intermittently, they cannot replace gas, coal and nuclear generation, even with further development". [Emphasis added]
Energy experts are and have always been concerned about the reliability and cost of wind power.
- Wind turbines don't help cut carbon emissions.
One of the wind industry's best-kept secrets is that the turbines don't save even remotely the amount of CO2 emissions the industry claims, because when wind farms are built new conventional power stations need to be constructed as spinning reserves to back them up.
Wind power's contribution to both "carbon savings" and electricity generation is negligible.
- Wind turbines are very expensive, indeed the most expensive kind of electricity production to build.
The unreliability of wind turbines necessitates extra expenditure to guarantee that they are always backed up by other energy sources. It is very costly because you always need two systems running in parallel.
A 2004 study by the Royal Academy of Engineering found that the cost in pence of generating 1 kilowatt hour of electricity was:
- 2.2p from gas
- 2.3 from nuclear
- 2.5 from the most efficient coal-fired stations
- 5.4p from onshore wind turbines
- 7.2p from offshore wind turbines
This higher cost has been cleverly hidden to the public by the way the government has made electricity supplying company forcibly pay for wind power through subsidies to renewables and levies on non-renewables.
All this has remained concealed until people read their new energy bills, because the result of the government's machination is that electricity suppliers were obliged to pay twice as much for their wind-produced electricity as for conventional energy and the extra cost was simply added to customers' bills without explanation.
And this leads us to the next point.
- Wind turbines have caused the electricity prices in consumers' bills to soar.
Since wind power cannot compete with fossil fuels such as coal and gas - which by the way emits half as much carbon as coal - it can be viable only if it is heavily subsidized by the government.
This is done through Renewable Obligations Order (introduced in 2002) forcing energy suppliers to buy an increasing proportion of their electricity from renewables, and a "Climate Change Levy" (introduced in 2001) on all electricity not produced from renewables, and the inflated prices are then passed on by energy suppliers to their customers, which will see their bills going up and up without knowing that they are subdsidizing the wind power industry without even having being consulted or informed.
Far from that, successive British governments have tried to cover up the real cause of rising electricty bills, the increase in which now averages £100 a year per household.
In the summer 2011 the UK's average household bill almost doubled from £740 in 2006 to £1,345.
The think tank Renewable Energy Foundation, very critical of the UK's scale of reliance on wind farms, published a report, Energy Policy and Consumer Hardship, analyzing the effect of these subsidies on people's bills.
Dr John Constable, the report's co-author, said to The Sunday Times 4 December 2011:
"Just two of the subsidies, the renewables obligation and the carbon emissions reduction target, have cost consumers £12 billion from 2002-2011. By 2020 the subsidies to renewable electricity will be adding £8 billion a year to consumer energy bills. The costs are just getting out of control." [Emphasis added]
Financial and energy policy adviser to the UK government KPMG issued a report estimating that, if the current plans go ahead, energy companies will have to spend £108 billions by 2020 on renewable and nuclear installations, without counting the more billions required for grid connections and energy efficiency. This will drive energy bills even higher. On purely economical terms, this huge level of investment may directly translate into fuel poverty.
- Wind turbines have been in large part responsible for 5.5 million British households' "fuel poverty", meaning they are forced to spend 10% or more of their net income on energy bills.
Industry regulator Ofgem calculated that the cost of achieving the EU's energy targets enforced by the British Government will be £200 billion, which means that the British average household fuel bills will double to about £2,400 a year by 2020.
- Wind turbines disfigure the countryside. That impact on the land is inevitable is admitted even by the wind power industry. Gaynor Hartnell, of the Renewable Energy Association, a trade organization for "green" power companies, said to The Sunday Times 4 December 2011:
"Renewable energy is diffuse and takes a lot more space to generate energy, so we have to accept it will be in our face more and there will be an impact on our landscapes".
- Wind turbines kill large numbers (an estimated 440,000 a year in the USA alone) of birds, who die after colliding with the blades.
Defenders of wind energy say that birds are also killed by traffic, pet cats, or die by colliding with glass plates of windows and buildings.
This "argument" is not an argument at all. You don't address a cause of death by asking people to console themselves with the thought that other causes of death exist. Imagine if a public health and safety concern were answered that way: yes, cancer kills people, but "put it into perspective" (as Bjorn Lomborg for one invites us to do in The Skeptical Environmentalist about the birds killed by wind turbines) and think that many others die in car accidents.
This is a pseudo-argument from people who don't care very much about the lives of birds, who often die in agony from the injuries.
In addition to the ethical issue there is the conservationist one: endangered, protected species are killed too, like the California condor and the American golden eagle: numbers of both species in California are dwindling because of wind farms.
Advantages of wind turbines:
- They make lots of money for companies investing in them, wind industry developers and manufacturers, due to government subsidies and cash incentives, for which, by the Labour government's own admission in its 2003 Energy White Paper (Section 4.7), ordinary people have to pay.
- They make the politicians appear good and "caring", looking after the environment and even "saviours of the planet" from the imagined catastrophes of global warming.
- They make the "environmentalists" happy, maybe because man is finally punished for his sins "against the earth".
Enza Ferreri is an Italian web author, Philosophy graduate and former journalist living in London.
Email: ehg89 at britaingallery dot com
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