Wind is in the news this morning, with the government due to announce renewable energy plans. Is wind a partial answer, or just hot air? There is so much contradictory evidence out there, it is difficult to decide. Yet few questions are more important. In this article we drill down to the key issues.
When Christopher Columbus, that’s the sailor, not the film director, set out in 1492, he not only discovered the Americas, he also provided a lesson on how we can slash the cost of travel and go some way at least to winning the war against the terror of climate change.
Think about how he got there. He sailed, under the power of wind. But here is the big flaw; he, just like the other great explorers, Vasco De Gama, Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook, etcetera, often got stranded, out at sea, waiting for the breeze.
And that, in a nutshell, says it all. Wind can provide much of our energy, but wind power is hugely expensive because it is intermittent… unreliable.
According to some, wind power is at least a partial solution to one of our biggest ills, but according to others, the development of wind power is a fool’s errand, destined to fail.
There is no doubt about it. The arguments against wind make a long list, and at face seem convincing. But the criticisms overlook one key point, a key point that was best expressed in 1966 by a man who co-founded Intel, a certain Gordon Moore.
According to a report produced for the Centre of Policy Studies – “Wind Chill: why wind energy will not fill the UK’s energy gap” by Tony Lodge – wind power is expensive, very expensive. It gives as an example Denmark.
You may know, Denmark has invested heavily in wind power, to the extent that there is a wind turbine in Denmark for every 900 or so people. According to the CPS report, in 2002 wind turbines provided Denmark with 19 per cent of the energy the country used. “In theory,” says the report, “at peak output, the Danish wind farms could account for nearly 64 per cent of Danish peak power demand.”
Here is the rub. The report says: “Not a single conventional power plant has been closed in the period that Danish wind farms have been developed. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants have had to be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity and to provide back-up.”
One of the arguments put forward by the pro-wind farm brigade is that you can fire up power stations every time the wind drops. No wind, turn on the traditional power stations. When it’s windy, turn them off. But, says the CPS report: “Danes have found that it is not practical for large baseload plants to be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises: indeed, the quick ramping up and down of those plants, such as coal, would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas).”
It says: “Baseload stations have to keep running so that they can ‘shadow’ wind turbines due to their intermittency. So when the wind is blowing perfectly for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price; or the turbines are simply shut off.”
The report then cites the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken, which claimed that: “Wind met only 1.7 per cent of Denmark’s total demand in 1999. And in 2003, for example, 84 per cent of western Denmark’s wind-generated electricity was exported (at a revenue loss).”
It says that: “The Danish grid used 50 per cent more coal-generated electricity in 2006 than in 2005 to cover wind’s failings. The increase in the demand for coal, needed to plug the gap left by underperforming wind farms, meant that Danish carbon emissions rose by 36 per cent in 2006.”
So that is pretty damning stuff.
There is another snag with wind. According to David J.C. MacKay, Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, Cambridge University: “If we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the country with windmills, we might be able to generate half of the energy used by driving a car 50 kilometers per day each. Britain’s onshore wind energy resource may be “huge,” but it’s not as huge as our huge consumption.” In his book “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” he said: “I should emphasize how audacious an assumption I’m making. Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person are fifty times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; seven times all the windfarms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.”
Then there’s the cost of wind turbines. CPS says: “The construction of wind farms in the UK, both onshore and offshore, is facing large cost increases as the raw materials required to build them become harder to obtain. Turbine costs alone have risen by about 30 per cent in recent years. Siemens, which makes turbines, has no spare capacity.”
CPS says the cost of electricity generated by onshore wind is around three times more than electricity generated by nuclear power.
So let’s just give up then. Forget wind. Let’s focus on nuclear power instead.
It is just that these arguments overlook the key point.
Technological progress is a function of the resources we invest, and time.
When the US government charged the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with the task of investigating how to protect data stored on computers in the event of an attack, ARPA developed a computer network, which it launched in 1969. This network evolved into the Internet.
The point is this: the very act of developing technology, advances our knowledge with unpredictable, but often far reaching and hugely beneficial, consequences. That is why we are what we are today, and not still scavenging for a living in the Rift Valley.
Wind power is like computers in another way. Wind turbines are produced in massive quantities, and relatively quickly, unlike nuclear power stations that take decades to be built. This quick turnaround increases the rate of technological advance. In short, wind turbines are subject to their own kind of Moores’ Law.
And they are getting better. According to this week’s Economist, Victor Abata, General Electric’s vice-president says that in 2002, GE’s wind turbines were out of commission for 15 per cent of the time; now it is more like 3 per cent of the time.
Sure, there is a spike at the moment in the cost of wind turbines. Spikes occur. Computer chips don’t always go down, there are occasions when they are in short supply and price goes up. This happened in the early 1990s. But, over the longer-term, the trend is down, a long way down.
As more and more wind turbines are built, economies of scale will set in. They won’t get more expensive. To say they will get more expensive as more are built goes against the fundamental theories of economics.
The anti-wind brigade talk about the law of diminishing returns. In practice, examples of returns diminishing with greater production in industry are rare. That is why globalisation is producing so much economic development.
It seems more likely that, once we get over the current bottleneck, wind turbines will get cheaper, and more efficient.
The larger the area wind turbines are spread over, the better. Denmark is a small country. The weather probably does not vary much across the land on any one day. It is not like that in the UK. It may be calm in Sussex, but blowing a gale in Scotland. By spreading wind farms across the UK, energy generated by wind becomes more predictable. This is even more the case if wind turbines are spread across Europe.
But the truly exciting side of this story is this. If you can combine wind energy with information technology, a new opportunity awaits.
Moving forward, computers will be able to apply the appropriate energy source to different appliances.
So, things that require electricity in a more flexible way could draw their energy from the wind. Storage heaters that heat up using electricity, then store the heat, releasing it gradually, are one example. Another might be air conditioning. If you go to bed and leave your mobile phone battery on charge, then all you really care about is that it is charged up when you wake up. You don’t care if it charges in intermittent bursts throughout the night.
The same applies, by the way, to the laptop computer this article was written on; it was charged up last night.
But, and this is the truly exciting bit, think about electric cars.
You can’t have failed to notice, electric cars are in the news. They are supposed to be many times more fuel efficient than petrol, and for people who travel no more than 50 or so miles a day, can provide all the energy required.
And when can you charge up electric cars? When you are not using them. Wind generated electricity may be ideal.
In a way then, it will be as if our cars will be able to sail down the motorway. But there is one big difference with sailing.
No doubt Christopher Columbus would have loved to capture all the excess energy in a storm and use it when the wind stopped. Well, thanks to the potential for spreading many wind farms out across a huge area, linked via a grid, and thanks to batteries that can store energy, especially the batteries that will sit in electric cars, Columbus’s wishes may soon be granted.
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