Green energy that isn't.

I have been shot down before, on here, for saying what a stupid idea wind farms are, I know this article mentions that those businesses don't have these BUT, what a waste of time they really are and anyone who believes in 'green' power are deluded if you take time to look deep into what they really are how they are built and the time taken to keep them working, same thing with cars' too! 

Looking at Gridwatch now, wind is the 3rd biggest source of generation, only just behind nuclear.  I would say that wind energy is doing its job very well at the moment.  We won't need to build many more turbines before it's 2nd.

Be aware that the 'pollution created during manufacture' figures that get bandied about both for wind turbines and electric cars tend to assume 500g/kWhr for the CO2 equivalent of embedded energy used during  manufacture  - this is correct, only if the steel comes from a coal fired furnace and the power for the milling, welding  machines and so on from a coal fired power station.


This is a perfectly reasonable assumption when the renewable technology does not exist at all, and the product is being developed for the first time. Less so now.  It suits certain vested interests to recycle the old figures,and not mention this bootstrapping process where the energy to make the 2nd wave of machines comes in part from the work of the first.

Electric steel mills and any other kind of metal smelting can just as easily be run off a wind farm, or tidal or solar power, so long as the electrons go back and forth at the right frequency and right voltage.

It ought to be common knowledge by now that most energy firms do not generate energy themselves; they purchase it from organisations that do then sell on to consumers. They are supposed to declare their fuel mix, i.e. the proportion of energy they sell that can be attributed to renewable, nuclear, oil, coal, etc. You should find this on their web sites, though some do not make this easy.


Does anyone know of instances where the fuel mix has been offered in a misleading way?

Gary states "not only is it the cleanest form of energy production...  its the cheapest.." 

It is true that wind energy can be described as the cheapest form of energy production, but only if you measure at the connection point of the wind farm and you allow it to operate parasiticaly on a grid which deals with all the stability and reliability. If wind, solar, etc have to include back ups for when they are not producing and frequency stability they don't look cheap at all. As I said in response to Mike, you can reduce the CO2 required to make wind turbines by taking the energy required from existing wind turbines but it has to be reliable. Once your furnace has cooled to a certain level with metal in it it is just scrap.


Best regards


Roger

Indeed but only burning the coal when the wind is  not blowing does help, and significantly.

I agree things like tidal storage are also needed to bridge the gaps once you have no fossil fuel at all.

The intermittency requires you to consume significantly more resources than a power source with 90%+ capacity factor.Taking 33% capacity factor for wind the connecting cables, transformers, switchgear etc needs to be rated for peak or close to peak output (if the peak output will sometimes be delivered for more than 24hrs playing with thermal capacities is probably not enough. For solar it might work ? ) and will be three time bigger than actually required. For offshore wind this will be some significant cabling. Some form of storage or back up will then be required. Tidal basins require a very large infrastructure resource investment up front but should have a long lived basic structure. Thermal stations as back up also require significant resources. These resources are not usually put in the balance for wind and solar. They just work from their connection point, we will get £X for every MWhr we send out, all the rest is' Somebody Else's Problem'. Renewables are also resource hungry, from available data a wind equivalent to Hinkley Point C would require more concrete and steel for a 20 year service life with intermittency compared to a 90%+ capacity factor for 60-80 years.


All the 'we will be 100% renewable by 20xx' seem to assume almost infinite resources to reach this point.


I would like to find real data to allow me to support the dash for renewables, but there are still too many gaps.


Best regards


Roger

mapj1:

Indeed but only burning the coal when the wind is  not blowing does help, and significantly.

I agree things like tidal storage are also needed to bridge the gaps once you have no fossil fuel at all.

Good point. Imagine it is mid-December around 6:00 pm. UK weather is dominated by a massive anti-cyclone; it is dark, freezing and windless.  Many are at home cooking meals and watching the news. Meanwhile shopping centres are ablaze with extended hours for Christmas shopping. National Grid Control meets this demand by starting up as many power stations as possible - yes coal ones too. Even if your energy provider is genuinely totally green, there is no way that you can claim that at that moment all your electrical power is coming from renewable sources. Energy suppliers bill you for energy, not power. When your monthly bill comes in there will have been enough wind and light during that month to match your own energy demand and credit you for being "green".


Now try to imagine this scenario some time in the future when we cannot fall back on fossil fuels. How do we meet the needs of that December evening? Well, let's hope for massive development of electricity storage methods. Tidal energy? Not easily controllable but at least predictable, though it may not deliver when we most want it. Otherwise we are looking to nuclear. Some would argue that nuclear is not totally green and it is a type of fossil fuel. On the other hand it is controllable, stabilizing and does not emit CO₂.


We have many hurdles to overcome before we can say we are totally green, as this thread is demonstrating.