Thread: Wind power? Anybody skeptical?

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About two months ago "Hotroddaddy" submitted a great new thread entitled "The Scoop on Gas". It sparked some lively discussion.

I posted an article ("Ice, Baby, Ice") by a guy named Ed Wallace who works out of Fort Worth. That article dealt with the part played by speculators in the huge upward spiral of oil (and subsequently gasoline) prices.

Ed sure ain't a guy who is afraid to speak out when he thinks everybody else is on the wrong track.

We're all getting bombarded by TV spots presented by a very wealthy wildcatter named T. Boone Pickens in which he (Pickens) proposes to build a chain of big windmill farms reaching from the Southwest clear up to Canada, thereby solving all of our power problems.

What do you think about Ed's take on this one?

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T-Bone for Him, Slim Pickin’s for Us



Special to the Star-Telegram
I’ve always found it tough to get too mad at T. Boone Pickens. Sure, just a few years ago he warned the world that we are at or close to Peak Oil — while simultaneously making billions of dollars betting on oil futures. Which led some to make specific comments during Congressional testimony, to the effect that his public doomsaying was a posture designed to drive the market for oil — and therefore his personal profits — higher.

At the same time, T. Boone gives away a sizable part of his earnings to charity. Besides that, he’s 80 years old and still out there speaking firmly, promoting big and fantastic energy ideas like a man half his age. Pickens’ demeanor shows that he doesn’t just love playing the game decades past the age when most retire; more than anything, he loves being the one making the rules by which everyone else has to play.

As of his last public pronouncements, the oil problem that concerned him most seemed to be the $800 billion we are currently sending out of the country to buy crude; fears for the end of the oil age apparently are now a lower priority. Yet now T. Boone wants America on wind-generated electricity — to solve "our oil problems."

A.K.A. "Tornado Alley"

Pickens’ plan is slightly complicated, but I’ll try my best to decipher it for you. What he envisions is building $1 trillion worth of wind generators across the American Midwest, from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border, known as America’s "Wind Alley." Pickens believes that these wind farms can provide enough electricity to reduce the amount of natural gas we need to run the more conventional power generation stations. In turn, we can use the natural gas that that move frees up for electricity to power automobiles — and that in turn would reduce our demand for foreign oil.

OK, that sounds great in theory, especially when Pickens notes that in 1970 we imported 24 percent of our oil and today that figure is nearly 70 percent. But Pickens also claims that investing $1 trillion in wind generators is far smarter than spending another $10 trillion on imported oil over the next decade.

Any radical plan to alter the equation for our energy needs involves pitfalls. Most of them are serious with this windy plan.

For one thing, refueling stations for natural gas vehicles are nearly as scarce as those for E85 ethanol. So you can’t consider just the $1 trillion it would cost to span the Midwest with wind generators — you also have to add in the infrastructure costs to make natural gas refilling stations convenient to the average consumer.

Bear in mind too the cost of all the new electric transmission lines that we’d have to build to get the wind power to major metropolitan areas from hundreds of miles away.

And then there’s the fact that Honda once offered its Civic GX natural-gas-powered automobile here in Texas: Demand was so poor that today you can only purchase them in certain regions of the country.

Need a Big Ol’ Fan?

None of these disadvantages is a deal breaker, should it be proven that our best energy option is moving in this direction. Sure, maybe more than a few individuals will be put off because Honda has put a $25,000 list price on its Civic GX, particularly when the base model Civic sedan costs just over $15,000. Counterbalancing that, of course, is that the cost of natural gas for automobiles is still substantially less than the cost of gasoline.

The government’s figures show that someone driving 15,000 miles per year in a Civic is spending $1,875 for gasoline, compared to only $798 if the Civic uses natural gas. Still, even at that rate it would take 10 years of ownership to break even — probably longer, given how high the price of natural gas has soared this year.

But the deal-breaking disadvantage of wind-powered electricity is well known. Its most serious problem is the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow — and even when it does, it takes a 13-mile-an-hour wind to power a large-scale wind power generation farm.

Moreover, the peak months for electricity demand are during the summer, and that’s exactly when the wind will not cooperate. Ask anyone who works outdoors in Texas what they’d give to have any breeze at all on a 100-degree day; if they half-laugh, it’s because they know that just doesn’t happen here often, if ever.

The Answer is Not Blowing in the Wind.

......... The rest of this article is continued below ........

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Making matters worse, because wind farms are an unreliable source for electricity, users still need complete backup power generation, whether it runs on coal, natural gas or nuclear power. And these plants are never really offline; as Robert Bryce pointed out in Gusher of Lies, his exceptional book on America’s energy needs, these other plants are sitting in what is known as spinning reserve. Kept ready to take over from the fickle wind patterns around the world, they use energy themselves: The real net savings of using this alternative electricity source just keep shrinking.

Bryce also noted that in 2004, England’s Royal Academy of Engineering released a report concluding that when one factors in all of the costs for wind power — including keeping the more traditional generation sources online — the cost of electricity from wind is more than twice the cost of electricity from coal, natural gas or nuclear power.

Closer to home, last year the Electric Reliability Council of Texas reported that wind power could be counted on as being reliable just 8.7 percent of the time during periods of peak demand. Say that again: 8.7 percent reliability for a trillion-dollar investment? Yes. And we would still to have to build more conventional generation plants to cover our future electrical needs — to cover that 91.3 percent of the time when there isn’t enough wind to generate electricity.

Congress: We Won’t Get Fooled Again

I haven’t even mentioned that the cost of installing a land-based wind generator has risen 74 percent over the past three years; it’s now pushing $2.6 million per megawatt hour. And there’s no reason to believe that these associated costs won’t continue to rise if some Congressional Mandate forces wind-powered electricity on us.

This brings up the next point: That’s exactly what promoters of this type of electricity are pushing for, a mandate from the government to move forward.

Here’s where Pickens shows this hand. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal he says this miracle can be accomplished without any further government regulation — but then immediately adds that Congress should mandate wind power and its subsidies. For what it’s worth, there is a 1.9 cent per kilowatt tax credit for wind farm owners now, but that was not renewed in the 2007 Energy Bill. Or, just using my electric bill from last month: If any of that energy had come from wind farms, their owners would have gotten a $5.54 direct tax credit. Now multiple that figure times millions.

Mandated structures don’t work. Over the past 35 years Washington has given away untold billions in taxpayer monies or lost federal revenues for pie-in-the-sky ideas that were supposed to wean us off of foreign oil. But when Pickens says we imported 24 percent of our oil in 1970 and it’s 70 percent today, he’s absolutely correct: Congress gave those billions away and got us nothing in return.

Speaking of Silly Things

In a meeting last week with Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors and just a prince of a guy, he mentioned that GM is still bullish on ethanol. Then he gave me a wry smile and said, "Ed might have another opinion." Well, yes. I do. Thanks, Rick.

Before the last ethanol mandate from Congress, the price of corn was around $2.50 a bushel and today is almost three times that amount. Ethanol has given consumers higher prices for all grain-fed meat — and the price of oil has almost tripled and the price of gasoline almost doubled. So where is the positive impact from adding ethanol to the nation’s fuel supplies? Obviously, if the original theory was that ethanol was going to reduce our need for foreign oil or bring its price down, then its mission is an abject failure.

Oil is up, gasoline is up, corn is up, eggs, milk and meat are up — but in fact, our oil demand is down. Not because of ethanol, but because the individual’s experience with recent gasoline prices has weakened demand.

After factoring in items such as higher prices for natural-gas-powered automobiles, the poor reliability from wind power and the creation of a national infrastructure for delivering natural gas for automobiles, maybe nuclear power is the right answer. Alternatively, we could commit to some basic acts of conservation, like driving slower to maximize our fuel efficiency, or making our homes slightly more energy efficient. Or, currently Option C, a $1 trillion wind farm experiment that will give us 100 percent reliable electricity — less than 10 percent of the time.

The key thing to remember is, they need Congress to mandate this into reality. "Mandate" is code for "a government handout to private industry to do something that makes zero financial sense from a business viewpoint, except to those who stand to make a killing."

© 2008 Ed Wallace

Ed Wallace is a recipient of the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and is a member of the American Historical Society. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four’s Good Day, contributes articles to BusinessWeek Online and hosts the talk show, Wheels, 8:00 to 1:00 Saturdays on 570 KLIF. E-mail: wheels570@sbcglobal.net

8.7 percent reliability for a trillion-dollar investment? Yes. And we would still to have to build more conventional generation plants to cover our future electrical needs — to cover that 91.3 percent of the time when there isn’t enough wind to generate electricity.

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Comments?

Jim

Several days ago, after going on Pickens' website http://push.pickensplan.com/ , I posted a thread expressing my distaste of his lining his pockets with this plan.

I can visualize Mr. Pickens and a few other "good ole boys" sittin' around one evening talking about how to turn their natural gas options into money. This looks to me like a solution that could have come from such a round table discussion.

He has stated publicly that he considers windmills ugly and will not have them on his property. What kind of statement is that to make if you're trying to push them off on others?

It's absolutely true that we must act to do something, but I'm not convinced that this is the answer. At least not after learning that windmills will produce energy less than 10% of the time when it is needed.

Windmills are great and work well in the proper areas......the people who are associated with them not soo great.
I am with Tech on the round table talks.........Thats how them bastages plot and ploy to get the most share of our money possible making it exspensive unrealistic to do,its not a cure all by any means ,but a good suppliment,the windmills that is,not the bastages.

We have lots of wind mills on the Altimont Pass in the East bay. When ever I go thru there, probably only 25% are spinning. It's very windy there! Not sure how well they do in massive quantities?
Another source of power that people have talked about for decades is hydro power from wave action in the oceans. I haven't heard anything recently about this, but it is also a promissing alternative.

I googled the tidal power and came up with this facinating wealth of info if anyone is interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
And more specifically here is a sea generator that is currently being hooked up to the UK grid
http://www.seageneration.co.uk/default.asp

I personally think this guy is a crook, like others said, he has the money to make the rules, so i dont trust his agenda`s! As far as the wind thing goes, im down with it if it works! I think there is plenty of uses for this technology.


Along the same lines, i had a idea. What if someone took a few high output car alternators and hooked them to a big windmill, or if you live on a river you could make a padelwheel, then just run it to a power inverter? Might work.

The car alternator idea has been done....many times and many years ago. The problem is that the alternator is of very low output..... alternator windmills were experimented with in the oilfields (and similar places) where they needed to run a low-power device like a datalogger.

The energy cost to manufacture the thing doesnt repay very well either

"Along the same lines, i had a idea. What if someone took a few high output car alternators and hooked them to a big windmill, or if you live on a river you could make a padelwheel, then just run it to a power inverter? Might work." [/QUOTE]

Funny you should mention that. I worked with a guy for years that powered his acreage, house and shop, from a very large homemade solar panel, a home made groundwater system, he made the holding tank out of an old silo, and a several old windmills with high amp car alternators running into a huge bank of old telephone switch batteries. He fought the local electric coop for years because he wanted to only use their power for back up and they didn't want to be tied into the same panels as his "junk". They finally unhooked him from their system and he is still running on his own.

Now I wouldn't neccessarily call his a success story because he was constantly having problems with his system, and he was down as much as he was up, but he is the type to live with it just to prove he could.

John

Big Tracks, Thanks for a good discussion of the use of windmills. It seems to me that windmills should be put high up in the Rocky Moutains or along the Blue Ridge. Perhaps the prevailing winds are steadier along mountain top ridges but I wonder how one could tell the National Park Service to clutter up the Blue Ridge scenic view with windmills. On the one hand they need to be white so birds can avoid them while on the other hand some sort of mottled camoflage paint scheme might make them more acceptable in the scenic areas. Personally, my wife and I enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive very much as a sort of time warp where we can go back to the era of public works building in the 1930s, so white windmills would probably be outrageous in that setting but camoflage paint schemes might make it acceptable. However, I wonder if winds over mountain ridges are continuous even then. The bobbing sea generators may have more promise. I was button-holed a few weeks ago by an idealistic student on campus after my class. He had a notebook of "Clean Energy" options he was pitching which totally ignored that nasty old "nuclear option" or "dirty coal" or any fossil fuel that would make CO2. He did have some leads on local home improvement companies that can install home rooftop photovoltaic panels but again what happens on cloudy days (?) and that option is very expensive for an average home owner. One possible answer is to use sporadic electric generation from photocells and windmills to pump water back up hill to holding reservoirs and then use hydroelectric flow down hill of that water. This sort of technology is already in use in places where night time electric power is used to pump water back uphill so less new infrastructure is used. With enough electricity in the grid and aided by a few more nuclear power plants we might all jump into aptera hybrids which are mostly electric and yet have small gasoline/diesel engines to recharge on-board batteries when out of range of a plug to the power grid. I saw a performance video on a Porsche coupe with an 11 inch diameter electric motor and it moved right along quite well. I note there is a graded performance/power improvement in automotive DC motors in going from 9 to 10 to 11 inch diameter motors. Still, what is needed is a deliberate plan to convert to an electrical grid by increasing drilling for more petroleum under some sort of gradual plan to convert from combustible fuel to other energy forms. Frankly, the circus called Congress hardly inspires confidence that any plan can be carried out under government supervision, although the CCC camps did construct wonders like the Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge. It does look like business enterprise will need to do it but then one has to worry about government regulations. A longer path process would be to use intermittant power to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen but then you need a whole new infrastructure to store and sell hydrogen safely. Then there is a possibility that coal could be converted to "water gas" by spraying water on red hot coal in the absence of air and then sending the water gas to a zeolite catalyst to make liquid alcohols in the "Sasol" process originated in WWII Germany and improved in South Africa. That would be a clean use of abundant coal and maintain the infrastructure of liquid fuels but generally speaking the Sasol process is very expensive and would generate CO2; besides who is listening to me? Maybe a few of the "Big Oil" companies will have enough autonomy and business sense to diversify to several forms of energy. The BP ads seem to imply this but who knows what the real situation is inside the company.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

Wow, I guess here in the backwoods we're doing it all wrong again...this time with windmills. They seem to work, here...and there's not even a pile of dead birds below them everyday!!!! There's getting to be more and more of them around, one plant makes the blades for them, and powers their plant with two windmills. There's a bunch of them over in Minnesota along state hwy 23, they only run half of them at a time cuz there isn't a big enough power grid to handle the distribution yet. One dairy farmer put up two of them to run his dairy barn, milks about 600 cows and sells the extra electricity back to the power company....

We have E-85 pumps along with propane and natural gas refill stations scattered around the area, some farmers are running a bit of biodiesel, too.

I know, none of these things work and are not cost efficient.... But from what I hear, if they start drilling a new oil well today, it will be 5 to 7 years before it comes out the hose and into your car....

Coal plants are dirty, nuclear plants will kill us all, windmills kill migratory birds, ethanol depletes the worlds food supply.....and on an on.

Nothing will work, let's just keep bad mouthing everything somebody proposes until gas is $10.00 a gallon and it cost $8,000.00 to heat your home for the winter.... We're dead, why try anything new????

As the old saying goes, if you're not part of the solution then you must be part of the problem.....

Drill them wells, build them refineries, oil will last forever. I can wait 5 to 7 years before I need to buy gas anyway......

There was an old guy here who experimented with windmills. He was semi-retired and his part-time day job was running a towing business, so he always had a field full of derelict vehicles sitting around... He built the windmill blades out of large PVC pipe that he cut in quarter-round sections on a band saw. The hub was a spindle and rotor off the front of a junk car. The outer ends of the blades were supported by a big ring made from electrical conduit. He used the windmill to chain-drive a big truck alternator which, in turn, charged a bank of batteries. The batteries were connected to a power inverter which supplied some of the power to the motor home where he lived. In the winter, he used it to power the heater; in warm weather he used it to power the TV and his reading lamp. He told me once that it didn't put out enough power to run his air conditioner. The A/C unit would sap the batteries in a short time, so he was going to build a bigger unit with more output and more batteries. Unfortunately, he had a stroke which put him in a wheel chair and then he died shortly after , but I think he was on the right track.

The advantage to wind power is that it is available day and night. Solar power is only good during daylight, so additional batteries are necessary to store power for nighttime use. Either way, though, after the initial cost of hardware installation, the power is cheap. Sunshine and wind are free for the taking; all we need to do is harness the power. The technology already exists and the more it is utilized, the cheaper it will become.

I'm all for anything that gets us away from our dependence on foreign oil!

People with large amounts of wealth are almost always met with distaste by those of us without.
I have seen the ads. I am not well informed on the issue of T-bones motivations and it may not be the "big" answer to the oil situation, but it is sure a source of energy that needs developed aggressively. Yes they are ugly, so are power lines but who amongst us would give up their electricity to free our landscape of that blight?
It will take wealthy people to develop radical energy alternatives, the less than wealthy would be squashed in the attempt, like Schauberger, Tesla, Wilhelm Reich, the Joe cell and any number of other proven workable energy sources that weren't profitable for the wealthy. And yes, they will probably make money doing it.

You guys should visit SW Alberta. There are hundreds of huge windmills there, feeding into the grid. Same in Saskatchewan, down by Swift Current. My cousin has a few old Windchargers making electricity for part of his farmyard.
Saskatchewan is windy because Alberta blows and Manitoba sucks!

I have been through southern California windmill fields, thousands of them.
Also I am not sure where all the new ones are going but I noticed a steady stream of parts flowing west through Texas on I-20. Single blades look to be 80-90 feet long.