Is the Myth that Wind Power is Cheap Being Exposed?

There seem to be some unrealistic views that wind power has no environmental impact and that it delivers a useful product.

The manufacture and installation of wind turbines, especially offshore, consumes a large amount of resources and energy.  Exactly how much is difficult to determine, the wind industry is not very transparent, but they are working with a low density energy source. Various energy paybacks have been quoted generally a year or two but usually without detail. The recent financial difficulties that the turbine producers are in suggests that they have been underestimating their resource requirements to meet the political target of ever falling cost of wind power. Those projects that bid under £40 per MWh had no chance of success as we are seeing now.

What are the real requirements? The main components of a wind turbine are concrete and steel, both energy intensive and polluting. The composite blades use large amounts of oil based products, what do you do when you ‘Just Stop Oil’?

What do you do when a wind turbine reaches the end of it’s working life? What is it’s working life, 20 years? The head and blade assembly can be replaced, keeping the tower if it is still ok, but the offshore environment is very harsh. How often can they be repowered, once or twice?

What is the actual impact of wind turbines on the environment? They remove energy from the air flow, they disturb the stratification of the air, especially the latest giants. What does this do? Some studies suggest the a wind farm can ‘steal’ the energy from another farm 50km away. Other studies appear to show lower rainfall downstream of wind farms possibly due to the air mixing/disturbed stratification. Bird kill is often mentioned, I am not sure about the effects on marine life, whales etc. There is a logic in the effect of low frequency  sound on them but no real statistics or causation.

What do wind farms deliver? They deliver intermittent energy when they want to and are only economic if we are forced to buy it. With the current fairly small penetration the supply grids can cope with this even though it reduces the efficiencies of the generation sources that have to supply the back up. This is not put into the wind farms environmental budget, nor are storage systems like batteries. Hydrogen then brings another set of questions.

An onshore wind farm in Sweden, Markbygden Ett, tried to deliver base load electricity to Hydro with a contract where Markbygden had to make up any shortfall in supply with electricity purchased on the open market. The result is Markbygden  has filed for bankruptcy protection due to an inability to supply enough consistent wind power.

https://news.europawire.eu/hydro-faces-power-supply-disruption-as-markbygden-ett-enters-reorganization/eu-press-release/2023/11/15/10/02/31/125096/

I agree that burning fossil fuels for energy is a waste of valuable resources, but in the longer term wind may not be much better. Nuclear, especially the newer generation plants with load following capabilities which have been designed for easy decommissioning are a much better option. Used nuclear fuel is a problem, but a very compact problem. Fuel recycling and newer reactor designs that can burn more of it will further reduce the problems. 80 year plus service lives also sound good.

There seem to be some unrealistic views that wind power has no environmental impact and that it delivers a useful product.

The manufacture and installation of wind turbines, especially offshore, consumes a large amount of resources and energy.  Exactly how much is difficult to determine, the wind industry is not very transparent, but they are working with a low density energy source. Various energy paybacks have been quoted generally a year or two but usually without detail. The recent financial difficulties that the turbine producers are in suggests that they have been underestimating their resource requirements to meet the political target of ever falling cost of wind power. Those projects that bid under £40 per MWh had no chance of success as we are seeing now.

What are the real requirements? The main components of a wind turbine are concrete and steel, both energy intensive and polluting. The composite blades use large amounts of oil based products, what do you do when you ‘Just Stop Oil’?

What do you do when a wind turbine reaches the end of it’s working life? What is it’s working life, 20 years? The head and blade assembly can be replaced, keeping the tower if it is still ok, but the offshore environment is very harsh. How often can they be repowered, once or twice?

What is the actual impact of wind turbines on the environment? They remove energy from the air flow, they disturb the stratification of the air, especially the latest giants. What does this do? Some studies suggest the a wind farm can ‘steal’ the energy from another farm 50km away. Other studies appear to show lower rainfall downstream of wind farms possibly due to the air mixing/disturbed stratification. Bird kill is often mentioned, I am not sure about the effects on marine life, whales etc. There is a logic in the effect of low frequency  sound on them but no real statistics or causation.

What do wind farms deliver? They deliver intermittent energy when they want to and are only economic if we are forced to buy it. With the current fairly small penetration the supply grids can cope with this even though it reduces the efficiencies of the generation sources that have to supply the back up. This is not put into the wind farms environmental budget, nor are storage systems like batteries. Hydrogen then brings another set of questions.

An onshore wind farm in Sweden, Markbygden Ett, tried to deliver base load electricity to Hydro with a contract where Markbygden had to make up any shortfall in supply with electricity purchased on the open market. The result is Markbygden  has filed for bankruptcy protection due to an inability to supply enough consistent wind power.

https://news.europawire.eu/hydro-faces-power-supply-disruption-as-markbygden-ett-enters-reorganization/eu-press-release/2023/11/15/10/02/31/125096/

I agree that burning fossil fuels for energy is a waste of valuable resources, but in the longer term wind may not be much better. Nuclear, especially the newer generation plants with load following capabilities which have been designed for easy decommissioning are a much better option. Used nuclear fuel is a problem, but a very compact problem. Fuel recycling and newer reactor designs that can burn more of it will further reduce the problems. 80 year plus service lives also sound good.

Interesting to see an article in E+T saying that the £44 per MWh is not realistic and should be doubled:

Renaud Saleur, head of Swiss firm Anaconda Invest, told the Financial Times that deals for offshore wind would likely be loss-making “until governments realise they need to give $80 to $100 per MWh and not $30 to $40”.

Size matters in wind farm development | Engineering and Technology Magazine (theiet.org)

It also goes into the problems of interaction/screening between individual turbines and windfarms:

" If the wind blows along a chain of eight turbines, airspeed at the front can easily drop from 9m/s to 7m/s by the time it reaches the mast at the back". 

As the power is proportional to the square of the wind speed that is quite significant.

Even if you double it, that's still only 8.8p per kWh.

There does seem to be a desire to build bigger and bigger turbines, which means the manufacturers never end up mass producing them and never achieve the economies of scale that people were expecting.  Is it just one-upmanship as you can say "my wind farm is bigger than yours"?

I hope that anyone with any sense lays out a wind farm so that the turbines aren't in straight lines when viewed from the direction of the prevailing winds.

Simon Barker said:

I hope that anyone with any sense lays out

The article suggests that due to constraints on where the turbines can be built this can take place and be a problem. 

The realistic price for wind power is coming ever closer to new nuclear and that is before the cost of back up or storage.

I had to check the date on this one 

'An aircraft with 12 times the capacity of the largest 747 to deliver wind turbine blades' A serious lack of joined up thinking.

It’s the Skytanic! Plans revealed for world's largest plane — it's a whopping 356 feet long (nypost.com)

Wind turbines should be spaced in a diamond formation.  Think of a squadron of feeding manta rays (Mobula birostris)