Sustaining the Wind, Part I... [View all]

[NNadir]

A group calling itself “The FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance,” working out of the Frankfurt School, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program and the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Group has published study called “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment, according to which, in the period between 2004 and 2014, the world expenditure on so called “renewable energy” amounted to 1.801 trillion dollars (US). Of this, 711 billion dollars was applied to developing wind energy, an amount exceeded only by the investment in solar energy, which was 875.1 billion dollars in that same period.

The total “investment” in so called “renewable energy” in the last ten years is greater than the annual GDP (2013) of 179 of 192 nations as recorded by the World Bank , only 75 billion dollars smaller than the GDP of India, a nation estimated to contain a population of 1.396 billion human beings as of 2015, roughly 20% of the human race. For the amount of money spent on so called “renewable energy” in the last decade we could have written a check for about $1,200 dollars to every man, woman and child in India, thus almost doubling the per capita income of that country. It is roughly comparable to the 2013 GDP of Canada, a few hundred billion dollars larger than the annual 2013 GDP of Australia...

...The “WWF” figures assume that the steel for the predicted energy production for wind energy will take place over a period of 35 years. This would mean that two year’s steel production more or less would go to make wind turbines, and 33 years of production would produce other things, if, and this is a very big if, steel production can be maintained through this period at the levels now obtained.

The situation with respect to aluminum is more problematic. According to the World Aluminum Institute, in 2014, the world produced 53,034,000 MT of aluminum. Thus over the next 35 years, about the total of 7 years of production of this metal, at current levels, would be needed to construct the wind plants that the WWF happily predicts...

...Utilizing this 2013 intensity figure for 2014 production, we can estimate that the world used about 770 billion kWh of electricity to produce aluminum, or about 2.8 exajoules of electrical energy. Thus we see that the entire wind industry on the entire planet as of 2012 was only capable of producing just 67% of the electricity required to produce aluminum in 2014, never mind the electricity for running computers to host and read websites telling us how great the so called “renewable energy” industry is.

...The critical materials evaluated, with the quantities of ore required for an 800 kW on shore wind turbine (as found in table 3 in the reference) are fluorspar (145 kg), cobalt (196 grams), tantalum (545 grams), gold (514 grams), silver (1.5 kg), as well as, of most immediate concern, indium (1.21 kg), and small amounts of the elements palladium, platinum, rhodium and rhenium. I have chosen to report here the figures for an 800 kw on-shore wind turbine, but figures are also reported for off-shore turbines on a larger scale. The interested reader (with access) is invited to view the data in the original paper for onshore and offshore turbines. The paper does not focus, as we will do, later in this series, on supplies of the lanthanide elements neodymium and dysprosium, although these elements are very critical to the best performing wind turbines, not that the performance of any wind turbine, given their poor capacity utilization, can be described as “good.”

The Danes – and we will see that despite all the hoopla that has surrounded their wind program their actual energy production from wind energy is very small, even compared to wind capacity in other countries like the United States, Germany and China – keep an exhaustive and very detailed database of every single wind turbine they built in the period between the 1978 and the present day. If one downloads the Excel file available in the link for reference 29 one can show that the Danes, as of the end of March 2015, have built and operated 8,002 wind turbines of all sizes. Of these, 2727, or 34.1% of them have been decommissioned. Of those that were decommissioned, the mean lifetime was 16.94 years (16 years and 310 days). Twenty-one of the decommissioned wind turbines operated less than two years, two never operated at all, and 103 operated for less than 10 years. Among decommissioned turbines, the one that lasted the longest did so for 34 years and 210 days. Among all 2727 decommissioned wind turbines, 6 lasted more than 30 years...

...Recall that the authors of reference 28 made two statements. One was that the WWF predicted that by 2050 the world would have 25,000 TWh of electricity produced by wind power. For the last full year for which we have the Danish data, 2014, the wind industry in Denmark produced 13.04 TWh of electricity. Thus to scale up to 25,000 TWh/yr, the wind industry would need to be about 1900 times larger than the Danish wind industry, requiring, if the Dane’s averages hold, about 8,000 X 1900 = 15,200,000 turbines averaging 930 kW capacity. The second statement was that each 800 kW turbine required 1.2 kg of indium. Thus if 930 kW turbines could ultimately be built in the future using as much indium as 800 kW turbines use now, over 18,000 tons of indium would be required.

There’s only one problem with that figure. As far as we can tell, economically recoverable indium reserves on the entire planet are thought to be somewhere between 11,000 tons and 50,000 tons. Moreover, the current concern with indium supplies has nothing to do with wind power. The chief uses for indium right now are to produce “ITO,” Indium Tin Oxide, for use in touch screen cell phones and computer monitors and to manufacture CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Selenide) thin film solar cells...

It's my own piece, which I'm shamelessly pimping, rather long and desultory, I'm afraid, but graciously published on his website, Brave New Climate, by Dr. Barry Brook.

Sustaining the Wind. Part I.