Clean Energy Council delusional about wind power

Dug out of my files this 9 page April 2012 pdf from the CEC titled “There’s power in wind: national snapshot” – easily found by Google.
They have a few pages of statistics showing how marvellous wind power is at solving Australia’s problems. This screenshot from p 2 shows that if all “proposed” windfarms were built they would power 6,236,602 “equivalent homes”.

I thought that was a big number and sure enough the ABS in 2012 said there are ~10 million homes in all Australia.
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I am hoping some readers can check other CEC claims from 2012. Such as – wind power saves “…around 1 tonne of greenhouse gas for every megawatt-hour (MWh) produced.”
Moving on I see the CEC is still in existence – and have a new report out “Time for honest discussion about energy in South Australia”. At first glance looks a shocker too. They claim ” There is a very strong correlation between wholesale electricity and gas prices in South Australia.”
I would say – Post the closure of coal generation on 9 May 2016 – and at times of poor wind output – gas generation and imports are relied upon to meet demand. Increasing gas consumption in electricity generation will have a consequence of putting upward pressure on gas prices. Not the other way around as CEC claims.

7 thoughts on “Clean Energy Council delusional about wind power”

  1. With wind (and solar), “capacity” is nearly meaningless — it is the hypothetical amount of power generated if the wind (sun) were blowing (shining) at the optimum amount, 24 hrs a day. The meaningful figure is average power, which is a small percentage of capacity – 5-30% depending on various things. Another important figure is how much peak power can be replaced by wind. This figure is typically pitiful – less than 10%.

    And of course, any figure derived from the meaningless “capacity” figure, such as the equivalent households, is also meaningless.

  2. Somewhat OT

    India has discovered an NG as clathrates reserve in sandstone said to be bigger than all the world’s existing conventional gas reserves combined.

    Should be easy to extract. Just drill into it and release the pressure and it should just flow out.

  3. I am assuming that as John in Michigan said, the proposed capacity of 14,867 MW is the “nameplate” capacity, not the actual electrical production capacity. The capacity factor is said to be between 15% and 30% (Wikipedia), although another source states: “The total capacity factor for EU-27 countries in 2007 was 13%, according to the EIA. ”
    www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php

    Adjusting the total capital cost for a .13 capacity factor raises the capital cost to over $228 Billion. If you adjust the number of households served by the capacity factor of .13 keeping the same capital costs at the original figure, the number of households falls to 810,758.

    If one takes a more optimistic capacity factor of .20, then the numbers as calculated in the paragraph above are:
    Capital $148.3 Billion
    Households 1,247,320

    By the way, I find Wikipedia’s credibility on wind-farm capacity factors to be roughly zero. They use a wind-farm in Denmark as their sample calculation. This one has a capacity factor of 52%. Lower on the same page, they claim that “current wind farms are between 25 and 45%,” Then the claim that “future 140 meter towers are expected to have up to 65% capacity factor.” Here, as with many issues concerning climate, Wikipedia leaves the realm of education and launches into advocacy.

  4. I’m not certain how many people are aware of that little ‘trick’ that every proposed wind plant uses with that ‘X’ number of homes supplied.

    You need to be aware that any and every wind plant is only connected to the grid, and supplies every consumer, not just the Residential consumers (those ‘X’ number of homes) but every consumer connected to the grid, Commercial and Industrial consumers as well.

    Given that the Capacity Factor (CF) for wind is so variable, that CF can be equated to hours in a day for total power delivery, so a (ballpark) CF of 25% effectively means that the plant is only supplying its full Nameplate for 25% of the day, hence 6 hours a day, when averaged across the Industry Standard, power delivery averaged across a full year, which can then be calculated back for a 24 hour day, and considering some days will be higher and some lower.

    That CF when then extrapolated down to that equivalent 6 hours a day means that the wind plant, even if it theoretically was connected to ‘X’ number of homes means that it cannot supply all the homes for that full 24 hour period.

    So then, where does that figure come from, that ‘X’ number of homes supplied?

    In effect, they are hiding the truth in plain sight, as very few people know what it means, something the proposers of the wind plant rely on. Even then, it’s a ‘modelled’ figure based on a theoretical CF, which is in the original proposal, and more often than not, that theoretical CF is usually the standard one they use, 38%.

    So, they know the Nameplate, and the theoretical CF, and from that, they can then use the standard formula for calculating a proposed total power delivery for a year.

    From that total, (and then calculated for KWH) they use the average power consumption for a residence in that area, (KWH per day) and then they can calculate that the wind plant power delivered total equates to ‘X’ number of homes.

    The wind plant never delivers its power to those homes, as it supplies the grid only, but when expressed like this, it gives a better impression than actually saying the following.

    “This wind plant has a Nameplate of 400MW, but when the Capacity Factor is taken into account, it only delivers the equivalent of 152MW.”

    Be also aware that the up front modelled CF is hardly, if ever reached at all, as the current Australian average is barely 28%, and each year a plant is in operation that CF decreases.

    It’s a very clever ploy they use to make the plant seem like it is supplying vast amounts of power.

    Tony.

  5. Wind power is the lowest cost renewable energy technology that can be rolled out on a large scale. The national Renewable Energy Target provides an incentive to build the lowest cost renewable energy projects, meaning that wind power is likely to be the main technology supported by the target this decade.

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