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Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Researchers have carried out an environmental lifecycle assessment of 2-megawatt wind turbines mooted for a large wind farm in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. They conclude that in terms of cumulative energy payback, or the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation, a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit
within five to eight months of being brought online."
Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations.
We attended an investors meeting in Portland relating to solar power 2 yrs. ago....the panel of solar experts all kept talking about playing catch up with wind and how solar was getting it's ass kicked. Finally someone in the group asked "Can you tell us what room the wind energy investment group is meeting in...?"
The rebuttal is from a climate-change denial site?
What the fuck is this, Fox News? What's next, Free Republic?
Fuck you, Timothy. Seriously, just fuck off.
--
BMO
A 4 unit coal fired power station will be lucky to have 80% availability.
Maintenance is continuous on those things, so they don't have 100% availability either.
Admitted, the downtime is handled on site (3 of 4 units still run while one is down), but that's WHY there's a power grid. So the counter argument has flaws as well.
That's what they're for here, right? The "more skeptical take" is a joke. It's a fundamental nature of intermittent power sources and a well known fact that you need an improved grid over a large geographic area to filter out the outliers. Picking out one installation is dishonest, and so is to claim that the energy being intermittent falsifies the original cumulative EROEI claim, which had nothing to do with whether one installation is continuously sufficient. It's a blatant straw man on WUWT's part.
Ezekiel 23:20
What the hell was that inserted for? It was an idiotic point made on a site which clearly has a political axe to grind. It wasn't made well. Anyone claiming to engage in a scientific debate with the phrase "by my own observation" deserves to be laughed out of the room.
This is supposed to be Slashdot, not Fox. Why the hell was this included?
And of course the skeptical take comment section is filled with non-researched and non-constructive comments about wind energy.
Almost as if being for or against green energy were an overt political statement than a well thought out business plan and energy policy.
(I'm from Kansas, we have nowhere near enough utilization of wind energy, despite several large wind farms in the western part of the state).
If this wind farm expects payback in five to eight months, we should be able to find some other wind farm (anywhere) that had payback in less than a year, right? Does anybody have a pointer to that kind of success story?
The advocates of wind energy make no claim that the wind generators will run 24/7. Nevertheless, calculating payback as if they do provides a convenient comparison to other power sources. In practice, a combination of wind, solar and natural gas can economically provide power and greatly reduce the generation of greenhouse gasses and should cost less as usage of the technology grows. In fact, similar technology works for hybrid cars and for Florida Power & Light's hybrid gas / solar electric plant (http://www.fpl.com/environment/solar/projects.shtml). Obviously this is still an experimental arrangement, but it works for cars, so why not commercial electric power?
But the citation doesn't appear to include the costs of those "large scale energy storage" facilities. Nothing about batteries, hydralic lift storage, chemical stste change, etc. So it would appear to just as "biased". Or cheerleading, if you prefer.
So once a person factors in the battery and/or other large scale energy storage, does that change the calculus about the return?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Oddly enough both of the calculations in the OP were correct, yes, the wind turbine generates energy equivalent to its energy of manufacture quite quickly, and yes it is still a bad idea to rely on wind energy for use in a national grid except for a tiny percentage, each MW of wind turbine relies on an additional MW of conventional generators if you want 24/7 availability, or I suppose you could try energy storage, which ought to be added to the turbine operating cost and energy payback.
Interesting to see such knee jerk support for an inappropriate technology. I wonder if the posters above have ever thought through why Germany is /reducing/ its reliance on wind turbines?
Or you did not read/cannot comprehend the study, which has nothing to do with repayment of monetary investment in the turbine... It is repayment of environmental resources used.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
It's hilarious watching people argue over a topic that has already been shown to be a non-issue. The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.
-Matt
CdTe panels have been in this range for a while. It is expected that crystaline silicon will get there by 2020 for a central European site.
"The photovoltaic (PV) market is experiencing vigorous growth, whereas prices are dropping rapidly. This growth has in large part been possible through public support, deserved for its promise to produce electricity at a low cost to the environment. It is therefore important to monitor and minimize environmental impacts associated with PV technologies. In this work, we forecast the environmental performance of crystalline silicon technologies in 2020, the year in which electricity from PV is anticipated to be competitive with wholesale electricity costs all across Europe. Our forecasts are based on technological scenario development and a prospective life cycle assessment with a thorough uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. We estimate that the energy payback time at an in-plane irradiation of 1700kWh/(m2year) of crystalline silicon modules can be reduced to below 0.5years by 2020, which is less than half of the current energy payback time. "
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pip.2363/abstract
The price of electricity is falling in Germany owing to renewable energy. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... They like wind power.
"Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations."
And if you look at the site it's pretty much a site full of straw men and attacks on climate change friendly politicians and scientists, with little actual scientific facts (besides the grandiose endorsement of it's own content.)
Why is this link even here? Did someone just randomly Google it and stick it on there because, hey, it's on the internet? Or did someone want the site to get more page views?
C'mon editors. This is news for nerds. Not news my uncle sent me in his email about how Obama is part of the illuminati.
to be fair, i havent read their current analysis of this particular project. but watts up with that is well known to be well wrong about well lots :)
If you do it in dollar terms the payback will be much faster in some markets due to insanely high spot prices for peak power. In others it won't. Even in the same place six months later it may have much slower financial payback. Energy payback is far easier to determine.
About 30 years ago, "wind farms" were built in several places in California where the wind seems constant, not intermittent. One is in the San Gorgonio Pass along I10 between Beaumont and Palm Springs. Another one is in the Altamont Pass in the hills near Oakland. In both places, with what was then primitive technology, the constancy of the wind still justified the construction of these "wind farms". I have seen both installations, and I have never seen them idled by a lack of wind.
Similarly, there are places where sunshine is so prevalent that solar power would have few interruptions during the day. Unlike wind power, however, storage of electricity during the day is needed for use at night.
In the meantime, Southern California Edison has outages at all times of the year. These are not the result of unreliable generation sources. Instead, these are the result of not performing any kind of scheduled preventive maintenance on local portions of the distribution system.
They're note disputing the energy payback period
It doesn't hurt to read both sides of the story. In this case it's pretty obvious that both sides are fudging the numbers; "energy payback" can be whatever you want it to be by including or ignoring various factors.
Example: The earth crust contains 5% iron. So, when you're talking about producing steel, the issue is not the availability of the raw materials. The problem of producing steel is purely the amount of energy you have to put in, to convert the raw materials into a finished end product.Therefore it is a completely honest representation to look at the amount of energy required to produce the steel for the wind turbine, and see how long the wind turbine needs to be operated before it has produced that much.
Watts up with that looks like a Republican astroturf site dedicated to debunking climate science.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
So one turbines produces intermittent. Big f-ing deal. The correlation between windspeeds between to sides 100 km apart is below 0.5 (based on 10 min averages over a year). So lot's of turbines solve most of the problem. Then there are still moments that there is no wind anywhere. Yes we need to change the system to allow for that, but that is just evolution from a retarded polluting system to a more modern non-polluting system. So stupid how you find even engineers claiming how intermittancy is such a big problem. Engineers are there to solve those problems and we are going to. No reason what so ever to stick to the old polluting system.
Therein, as the "Watts Up With That?" commenters point out, lies the problem. You can *only* achieve that kind of ROI if you're connected to a power grid that will pay you fixed rates for your excess power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and guarantee availability of power in other circumstances (against base rates).
Power plants have a nasty habit of costing money every second while they're being kept in readiness, let alone when they're on standby or acting as spinning reserves. Money their operators can't recoup by selling power when there is a glut due to solar and wind generators.
As soon as you factor that cost in, the picture for alternative energy sources becomes a lot less rosy.
Not that we shouldn't try to maximise the fraction of wind and solar power, but let's be realistic and factor in the cost of keeping (conventional) power plants on standby instead of treating the power grid as a giant zero-cost battery!