Reply #8: Your misinformation attempt has been competely disproved.

[kristopher]

Here it is again just in case you didn't read it...

Wrong Claims About Danish Wind Power
Sigurd Lauge Pedersen

It is perfectly legitimate to hate wind power. But it is more convincing if you do your homework first. In his Financial Post Comment 8 April 2009, Michael J. Trebilcock appears to be willing to jeopardise his academic reputation by putting forward a series of wrong claims and false, suspect or irrelevant citations, mainly about wind power in Denmark.

Mr. Trebilcock claims that “Denmark …. has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant”. There is no citation for this claim. Wise in a sense, for the claim is wrong. Denmark has closed several coal and oil fired plants in the last ten years. Mr. Trebilcock claims that wind power “… requires 50% more coal generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability…”. Wrong again. One megawatt of wind power does not increase conventional power requirements – it saves 0,2-0,4 megawatts of conventional capacity. The high figure is for offshore wind power, the low figure for onshore wind power. This was shown by Diesendorf and Martin as early as 1980 (The Capacity Credit of Wind Power. 3’rd Int. Symp. on Wind Power) but is not very difficult to verify by standard probability theory. Yes, wind power is partly unpredictable. But so is a fossil or nuclear plant. True, they work most of the time. But 5-10% of the time they fail. Hence it is not unpredictability as such that distinguishes wind power from fossil or nuclear plants. It is the level of unpredictability. If Mr. Trebilcock’s argument were valid, any power system would need infinite back up: One coal fired plant can fail, hence needs a backup. This can also fail, hence needs a further backup and so on. Mr. Trebilcock’s argument rests on the unspoken assumption that electricity must be available to consumers always. It cannot be and it never will be.

Mr. Trebilcock claims that CO2 emissions went up by 36% in 2006 as a result of wind power. Again without citation. And of course this does not make sense. If a unit of wind electricity is added to any electricity system with fossil plants, production on a fossil plant will have to be reduced by one unit. The amount of hydro production will not be affected – this is determined by the amount of rainfall. Neither will nuclear production be affected – nuclear plants run full load (whenever they are available) for economic and technical reasons. Hence the claim that wind power increases CO2 is absurd. You can discuss which fossil plant that reduces it’s production, but that one does is simple physics. Mr. Trebilcock quotes “recent academic research” for a claim that wind power increases CO2 emissions. He does not specify which “recent academic research” he is referring to. Wisely in my view, since it does not make any sense at all (cf. above).

Mr. Trebilcock quotes Flemming Nissen from ELSAM power company. Not only is the quote misleading (at best). But Mr. Nissen has not been in ELSAM for years, and the company no longer exists. Mr. Trebilcock quotes Niels Gram of the Federation of Danish Industries. But it is years since he left. Mr. Trebilcock quotes Aase Madsen as Chair of Energy Policy in the Danish Parliament. A position she has not had for a long time.

Mr. Trebilcock quotes “a recent detailed analysis” that for each job created by state-funded wind power, 2.2 jobs are lost. Again, he does not specify the source. And again, I seriously disagree. The number of “wind jobs” in Denmark, around 20,000, recently passed the number of jobs in the bacon industry for which Denmark was long known (source: www.windpower.org).

Mr. Trebilcock claims that Denmark’s electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe. Again without quotation. And again wrong. The 2008 electricity price in Denmark to medium-sized industries is 7.85 eurocents/kWh, which is below the European average of 9 eurocents/kWh. Source: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu. Mr. Trebilcock may confuse electricity prices with electricity taxes. Danish taxes are high, yes, but this has nothing to do with wind power.

Denmark gets around 20% of it’s electricity from wind power. Is this a challenge? Absolutely. But it can be done. On the system operator website: http://www.energinet.dk/Integrationer/ElOest/ElsystemetLigeNu/energinet1.swf you can follow the Danish power production real-time. On the Danish Energy Agency website: www.ens.dk. you can find more information on energy policy in general and wind power in particular.


Sigurd Lauge Pedersen has a M.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in energy planning. He has more than 25 years of experience in the University of Copenhagen, Danish Technical University and Danish Energy Agency.

Your stock in trade is spreading misinformation - one clumsy, slimy, clotted, mucus-coated, typed-out mumble after another. Whenever I read a post by you I see a picture in my mind of the stapler guy from Office Space.

Your comparison of prices between Denmark and France may or may not be accurate, but it has nothing to do with what technologies we use moving forward since there simply isn't a question that new wind is far less expensive than new nuclear. Even by the most conservative estimates favoring all assumptions to nuclear power doing all its proponents claim wind is going to be cheaper. And we BOTH know that you guys are not going to measure up to your hype; it just isn't going to happen. They are going to bust their construction schedules; they are going to get built then go bankrupt because the world just kept reaching for renewables (because they are better no matter how much or what shit you make up) all the while they were building.
Yes, PRIVATE money is going to keep flowing into REAL green technologies and that is going to keep pushing the prices down. More and more capacity is going to come on line delivering more and more of that cheaper and cheaper electricity.

So do you see how it is going to happen?

All those nuclear plants built with the expectation that they are going to be able to sell 90%+ of their annual production capacity are only going to be able to sell 55% and "Ooops, there it is" - all that taxpayer money backing those dead investments is going to bail out yet another bunch of greedy bastards.

But we will be OK. There are always parasites on any healthy organism. We really just need to bath in a refresher course of reality and that will get the slime off.

Report compiling wind integration impacts from IEA WIND Task 25
Some countries already get a substantial share of their electricity consumption from wind power: Denmark 20%, Spain and Portugal 11%, Ireland 9%, and Germany 7%. Power systems have to cope with variable electricity consumption. Variable wind power will increase variations that the power system has to manage. According to a recent IEA WIND report, wind energy is rather smoothly integrated as system operators get on-line production levels and forecasted production estimates in their control rooms.
13 November 2009 by Claudia Pring

High penetration of wind power is foreseen in many countries and regions globally. Therefore the impacts of wind power on power system reliability are widely studied. Wind integration impacts report by a research task for the Wind agreement of International Energy Agency (IEA) has been compiled from work done in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK and USA. The report can be downloaded from IEA WIND Task 25 web site, find links below.

Adding large amounts of wind power requires reinforcing the existing transmission grid, including the interconnectors between countries and regions. New transmission lines may be needed where the wind resource is situated far from the existing network. Wind power will also increase the use of operational balancing power and thus increase balancing cost in the power systems.


The estimates for added balancing costs from investigated studies are increasing wind power production costs by 1–4 €/MWh. This is 10% or less of the wholesale value of the wind energy. Experience from West Denmark shows that the balancing cost from the Nordic day-ahead market has been 1.4–2.6 €/MWh for a 24% wind penetration (of gross demand). This is in the middle of theoretically estimated results.

Production from larger areas helps integration

It is easier to balance load and wind production from larger areas. This is because both wind variability and uncertainty will be reduced when geographically diverse power plants are aggregated. Additionally, larger balancing areas also can pool balancing resources. Large open electricity markets combined with intra-day and real-time trading lead to lower electricity costs. This market design also facilitates wind integration, because forecast errors of wind power production are much lower some hours ahead than day-ahead, and forecast errors also decrease when combining distributed wind power plants.

A wide, strong transmission network is a prerequisite for large electricity markets and aggregation benefits to smooth out variability. Increase in interconnection capacity between certain countries is needed in addition to national efforts, allowing stronger trading of (also) wind generated energy. Building the transmission for final amount of wind power will be more cost effective than reinforcing the grid piece by piece. Ambitious wind power targets in Ireland, Denmark, Germany, UK and US already foresee major upgrades in the transmission network. This is challenging, as building permits for new lines are difficult to obtain.

Studies show that despite its variability, wind power can contribute for a certain percentage to meeting the peak loads in a reliable way. This so called capacity value of wind power is lower than for conventional power, and will decrease as the wind penetration level increases.

New electricity storage has still low cost effectiveness for wind penetration levels of 10–20% (excluding some hydro power and pumped storage). With higher wind penetration levels the extra flexibility offered by storage will be beneficial for the power system operation. However, other forms of flexibility from generation units or flexible loads can offer cheaper solutions, if available to the power system. In any case, it is not cost effective to provide dedicated back-up for wind power in large power systems, just as it is not done for individual electricity consumption.

Further information: Hannele Holttinen, [email protected], Operating Agent of Task 25 of IEAWIND.

But hey, thanks for playing.