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.

Comments

Sounds about right...

[djupedal]

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...?"

Re:Sounds about right...

[phrostie]

a little rivalry is a good thing.

I'm a fan of both and still believe that putting all your eggs in one basket will just lead to other problems.

Re:Sounds about right...

[donaldm]

When considering solar power, wind farming is quite practical for large scale production (not for the residential home) however you still need some sort of storage or alternative power generation to offset the hours or even days when there is little or no wind (hence a survey).

Actually no matter what methods are used for large scale energy production it will always be "consumer pays", so if you as a home owner want to offset your electricity bill then solar panels are the way to go, but only after you have done your homework and by that you need to work out the initial costs verses the longs term benefits. Unfortunately it is so easy for so called "experts" to rip people off since most people have no idea how to work out what really is best for themselves in regard to energy utilisation.

Re:Sounds about right...

[AK Marc]

The wind is always blowing somewhere. We need a world grid. We already have Europe/Asia/Africa power grids. A grid that connects the world, probably along the lines of a Risk board, would let us move power from day to night, and from wind to still. There's more than enough power, we just have a storage or distribution problem to solve, and given the state of storage and the state of transportation, I think we'd be better off with world-wide distribution.

Re:Sounds about right...

[Scottingham]

The variable you are neglecting to consider is transmission losses.

Look into super-conducting cables. So far, only Germany has managed to get a 1km long super-conducting cable in place for a still tiny % of the energy necessary to make this global grid work in the way you're talking about.

1/3 Local nukes+1/3 wind+ 1/3 solar > coal

Re:Sounds about right...

[Neil Boekend]

That's because the power is generated as close the user as possible. Only the balance is transmitted through long cables, and then even at high voltage to prevent losses.

Re:Sounds about right...

[Cryacin]

Add hot air from politicians to that list. Oh wait, that's wind power. Nevermind!

Re:Sounds about right...

[GNious]

Diversity is critical in energy production - is part of why certain groups insists on dismissing any green source that is not capable of meeting 100%+ of energy-needs.

Re:Sounds about right...

[AmiMoJo]

Wind is actually pretty reliable over the short term. A bit of smoothing helps, and Japan has already deployed 50MWh batteries for that purpose. Even without smoothing with a number of turbines distributed geographically the output doesn't vary much over an hour, and is quite easy to predict a few hours in advance. That gives other sources plenty of notice to ramp up.

Home owners can't really lose with solar PV, unless they somehow get screwed on workmanship or installation costs. The panels with always pay for themselves in a few years and it's shear madness that new houses are being built without it.

Re:Sounds about right...

[angel'o'sphere]

The grid loss is something in the figure of 5% 7% of total power production germany.
That is regardless of the source. Difficult right now is the transport of wind power from the 'far' north to the 'far' south, because of lack of power conduits, not because of 'grid loss'.
The loss is usually about 7% per 1000km transport distance, however it depends on voltage. E.g. Kasachstan uses 1mega Volt lines, where the grid loss is about 6% per 10,000km, not 1000.
Superconductors are likely not a solution, I guess they are simply to expensive and if one breaks you have a long long long downtime.
A bit simpler are high voltage direct current conduits, the power companies are shifting slowly to them for long range power transport.

Re:Sounds about right...

[TheRaven64]

Transmission losses matter a lot less when generation doesn't cost you anything. If you have a coal power plant and demand drops, you burn less coal and lower your costs. When demand increases, you burn more coal and make more money. With a wind power plant, if the wind is blowing but demand drops then your choice is either 100% loss by just wasting the power, or something less than 100% loss by transmitting it. For very long distances, the same transmission mechanisms that we use for fossil fuels are applicable: store it in chemical form and put it in trucks / trains / boats. Whether the chemical form is hydrogen, diesel, aluminium, or something else is up to you.

Re:Sounds about right...

[TheRaven64]

It's also possible with smartgrid things to tweak the demand curve a bit. For example, a fridge or freezer needs to keep the contents in a temperature range with a little bit of leeway. It will typically let things warm until they're near the top of the range, then run the compressor until they're close to the bottom of the range. If your freezer knows about the spot price of electricity, then you may set it to an economy mode, where it will start the compressor early if power is sufficiently cheap, so by the time the price goes up (i.e. supply drops) you're effectively storing energy by having the entire contents of the freezer at the bottom end of its temperature range. The same is true for electric cars - if you're using one to commute and the battery will last a few days, then the amount that you're willing to pay for electricity varies based on how low the battery charge is. If it doesn't have enough for tomorrow's commute, then you'll pay more. If it does, then you'd happily top-up the charge cheaply when there's some surplus supply.

Re:Sounds about right...

[flyneye]

Remember those politicians are fueled by those of the Koch bros. ilk.
I couldn't help but notice that the wind map used by Watts Up was from some random day and not representative of prevailing winds AT ALL!
Perhaps someone there had a bit of cranial rectumitis when Googling for a wind map for their "research"( first clue, midwest winds prevail from the southwest 90% of the time and the map has north winds displayed, FAIL! I can show you an area in eastern Colorado where the wind nearly NEVER stops) I would suggest their research is not much more than jealous bunk. Anyway, to couple wind with solar power is a common solution to the fear that Watts Up is trying to instill in the reader.DUH! If it isn't windy, the sun shines most days in most places, so if one isn't producing, the other will in enough quantity that your batteries need not be drained. Further, the wind industry is producing jobs and boosting economy in rural areas that need it. Fuck the Kochs and their worry about their and their investors wallets. Plenty of other investments out there.

Re:Sounds about right...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

You mean HVDC cables? They're installed all over Europe and are working fine, thanks. It would be pretty straightforward to have several of them piping solar power from the Sahara and wind power from the North Atlantic into the same grid with very minimal transmission losses.

Re:Sounds about right...

[gadget junkie]

except, that are at least 4 types of energy ... coal, oil, gas, wood,gravity

there, fixed it for you. otherwise dams would generate no electricity at all, would they?
whenever I see discussions like this, I think:" is this an IRS convention or what?!?!". all these modelling is heavily dependent on transferring tax money from other things to Renewable energy subsidies. In no paper, or law, the requirement is for the plan to provide continous, on demand generation. Do that and every analyst will become far more honest.
one of the reasons? if like in Italy a renewable energy producer gets paid a multiple of the marginal price when he produces, all projections should be made with the same producer installing continous capacity on his own, with the attandant environmental impact statesments, pollution control, etc, or buying the availability from someone else, at twice the same price. the obligation on the grid operator to retire and pay produced energy would have a limit at the continous capacity declared by the operator.

Re:Sounds about right...

[wiggles]

> Home owners can't really lose with solar PV

Unless, of course, you happen to live somewhere other than Southern California or Arizona, where weather conditions don't permit the sun to shine at sufficient intensity over the whole year. Here in the mid/upper midwest, the payback period for a solar installation on my house works out to be 17 years. Wind, on the other hand, can be cost effective if you have sufficient land space to put up a tower. I see a few of my rural neighbors with wind turbines on their properties.

Re:Sounds about right...

[Grishnakh]

The latest thing I've seen from the Koch camp (I assume that's where it's from) is some picture about wind farms killing birds, and comparing them to gas and oil, and complaining that gas and oil companies have been fined for various practices yet they don't kill any birds (I guess they forgot about all the birds caught in oil spills).

WUWT

[bmo]

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

Re:WUWT

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

But their argument is irrefutable. "But the wind speed changes!! They didn't mention that!!". I only have three words. Double-U Oh Double-U.

Re:WUWT

[afxgrin]

"A 2.0 MW wind turbine would generate 6.12 GWh per year, assuming a 35% capacity factor."

Right in the fucking source paper. They don't even have that as an argument...

Re:WUWT

[Rei]

Typical Slashdot. "New peer reviewed science study says something. But random guy on the internet says they're wrong!"

Re:WUWT

[Anubis IV]

Does it matter what the source is, so long as it presents a testable claim?

Besides which, their argument was mischaracterized in the summary. It's not a rebuttal of the ROI period, which is what the summary seems to suggest. Rather, they took issue with the overly-broad statement that seemed to suggest that each turbine would replace the need for traditional power sources for over 500 homes, which is, as far as I can tell, an accurate claim. Obviously, there are lulls in the wind, so while it may on average provide that much power, the lulls would mean that the traditional sources will still need to be used. What was left unsaid is that they would be used in lesser quantities.

Yes, it's a "well duh" sort of thing, but it's also accurate. And if you don't think it is, feel free to disprove them. It wasn't exactly a complicated argument, nor a particular meaningful one, but that's also a bit of a "well duh" sort of thing, given the source. ;)

Re:WUWT

[TapeCutter]

Indeed. Watts' opinion on anything climate related is about as relevant and enlightening as Fred Phelps opinion on gay bars.

Re:WUWT

[Uecker]

No. You will understand the world much better if you dig deeper and rely on primary sources with hard data (I posted links elsewhere) and not just google something which already fits your opinion. Coal use in Germany is on a similar (high) level as always. This is not good, but has nothing to do with "returning to massive building of coal plants" which is a myth.

Re:WUWT

[TapeCutter]

Does it matter what the source is, so long as it presents a testable claim?

Yes. Stubbornly refusing to withdraw a claim when multiple independent tests have already found it to be false is the definition of a denier. It's the reason why we laugh at flat earther's and (the original) April fools.

To test Watts' claim simply calculate three trends from his data, one for his "worst" 100 stations, one for his "best" 100 stations and one for the full set of ~1100 stations, if his claim has merit there will be signifcant differences in the three trends. So go ahead, you test his claims if you doubt, I've already done so on many occasions, that's what science is about.

BTW: When you find his claims don't hold water, don't be tempted to post a video about it on youtube because he will issue a false DCMA to try and shut you up.

Re:WUWT

[rossdee]

"(How do Americans manage to consume so much electricity in their households?)"

That electricity is used because of global warming.
Air conditioners use a lot of power in the summer, when its 82F and 100% humidity

Re:WUWT

[Burz]

WUWT's publisher gets Koch funding by way of the Heartland Institute... so, not "random".
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2...

Now I get to put my first /. mod on my (rather small) enemies list and my exclusion list: Timothy.

Re:WUWT

[rtb61]

The proper fiscal calculation is. Work out the total capital cost and calculate the monthly financial payment based upon borrowing all that money and then add in monthly maintenance and administrative costs, deduct that from the value of the average energy generation forecast and associated revenue, what you have left over is profit on the investment. Technically in financial circles the investment starts paying off in the first month or it never really does. In total over the life of the system, you check to make sure it pays itself off before it expires.

Any other arguments are meaningless, extra generators, mass storage etc need to be costed completely separately as they are about recovering energy costs from other sources, so you just really compare them to the wind generators and in the case of batteries storing the energy of wing generators to sell it other times, versus other energy generation methods.

Re:WUWT

[Jeremi]

Targeting specific birds, how many top of the food chain birds do cats kill? I have doubts that cats or glass panes are killing as many eagles as windmills.

67 eagles have been verified as killed by wind turbines in the last 5 years (source).

That's out of a population of about 20,000 bald eagles (source) and 30,000 golden eagles (source).

So, are wind turbines a significant problem for eagles? Well, they do kill an estimated 0.13% of eagles, so they aren't completely harmless. On the other hand, the American Eagle Society's threats to eagle survival page lists the primary threats to eagles as: DDT, Lead shot poisoning, secondary poisoning, electrocution, poaching, habitat destruction, and other predators. Wind turbines are not mentioned at all.

Therefore, we can conclude that "wind turbines kill eagles" is a not a valid criticism of wind power.

Re:WUWT

[AmiMoJo]

Rather, they took issue with the overly-broad statement that seemed to suggest that each turbine would replace the need for traditional power sources for over 500 homes, which is, as far as I can tell, an accurate claim. Obviously, there are lulls in the wind, so while it may on average provide that much power, the lulls would mean that the traditional sources will still need to be used.

The same logic applies to all electricity sources because none of them can run un-interupted at full output for their entire lives. Even coal and nuclear plants need regular down time for maintenance, as well as unexpected events.

The grid is a pool, with many generation sources contributing to it. If you only had one turbine they might have a point, but when you have hundreds or thousands you can rely on them for a certain amount of "base load" power. In fact they are more reliable that traditional forms of generation, because a single failure at a coal/gas/nuclear plant can knock out hundreds or even thousands of megawatts, but a single turbine failure is insignificant.

Coal has downtime as well

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Coal has downtime as well

[dbIII]

With respect, wind turbines are tiny and although a great deal of maintenance is required it is both trivial and not constrained by time. So you are down 2MW - big deal, get around to fixing it next week when the crew is free.
Gas is also small and high maintenance with respect to coal (three to five years between shutdowns on well run coal fired plants), but it doesn't take very long to either build or fix the things in comparison.
The major reason wind is now a player is that the things are both a lot more reliable and easier to get going again than they used to be. Crews apparently swap things out and transport the damaged parts to be repaired in a shed instead of way up in the air.

Re:Coal has downtime as well

[TapeCutter]

Any generatortor will need maintenance, the real question is; is the maintinace cost preventing you from paying off the capital investment, and the answer for both is an obvious - no.

The FF popoganda normally ignores that and talks about "base load" as if it is somehow essential. This is total bullshit since no city will ever have a flat demand curve, base load means you must fire up gas turbines during demand peaks and pump water up hill during demand troughs, exactly the same as needs to happen for any solar/wind/wave/tide farm. By definition a flat supply curve will only ever match a wavy demand curve at the points where the demand changes between under and over supply. Solar actually does a better job at maching the demand curve in specific senarios such as a hot day when air-conditioners are working overtime.

Coal assets, mines, railways, ports, have been steadily losing value recent years, they are now worth roughly 40% less than they were a decade ago and are in danger of becoming "stranded assets" (google it). The "world's largest coal port" being planned for Queensland is now looking unlikely to go ahead due to major investment funds withdrawing from the project, HSBC, Dueches Bank, Bank of Scotland, et-al. This is not because of the enviroment, it's because the current price of coal makes it uneconomical in hard dollar terms.

Add the above economic dificulty to the fact it's now cheaper for India to build solar farms than it is to import coal from Australia. The new Indian PM has declared he will use solar power to provide electricity to 400M people. The new Aussie PM is attempting to keep climate change off the agenda at the G20. Coal is Australia's #1 export and (as with Canada), it makes up a big chunk of our GDP). Wich succinctly explains why the conservative governments in both those countries are climate "skeptics".

The technological tide is turning the energy economics of the 20th century on it's head, ignoring future miricale breakthroughs such as fussion power, renewables we be ubiquitous in 20yrs because they make economic sense now and the number$ are still improving at a rapid pace. It's not that far-fetched to see an impending deflation of enrgy prices in the 2020's if the trend continues.

Of course WUWT are going to play contrarians.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Show me the money!

[Entrope]

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?

Re:Show me the money!

[thaylin]

That is not what it means by payback. The article, if you read it, means that the net cost of creating the turbine in terms of electricity and minerals is re-payed in 8 months, basically the cost to the environment.. Of course the skeptical site has nothing but a large strawman using the same type of argument you are using.

Re:Show me the money!

[grim4593]

That is an odd definition of payback. The raw material cost of creating something is irrelevant since you cannot buy anything at cost: there are always value-add processes and profit margins to consider.
That said, the GP is right, unless these wind turbines in the study have noticeable improvements compared to other turbines I would expect there to be similar installations around the country that are making profits/savings for their investors. There should either be news about those gains or news about how the investors who previously built wind turbines are investing even greater sums of money due to their success.

Re:Show me the money!

[Michael Woodhams]

They aren't. They're using an established term "energy payback". The authors wrote an analysis which will be useful to many people but used the word "payback" in a way which does not match your preconceived notion of how it should be used. For this, you label them "charlatans".

So all the people interested in energy payback times should not be able to publish or read about it because you've claimed ownership of the word "payback" and won't license them to use it? They should use a less clear term to express their meaning because otherwise some random idiot who reads technical papers might make the leap "payback = money", despite the term "energy payback" being self explanatory?

Had you argued that because this is "energy payback" rather than financial payback, it isn't worthy of being reported on Slashdot, I could respect your argument. Instead you label people charlatans because what they discuss is not what you're interested it.

Re:Show me the money!

[im_thatoneguy]

It's an odd definition but it's a common one. People often complain (incorrectly) that solar cells take more electricity to manufacture than they produce in their lifetime.

This is a study saying that they "pay back" the input resources in a small fraction of their life span. It's refuting all of the FUD around green energy that it's just taking Coal and Petroleum and storing it inefficiently in a wind turbine or solar panel to be slowly released over the course of several years.

Re:Haters gonna hate.

[LynnwoodRooster]

So once a person factors in the battery and/or other large scale energy storage, does that change the calculus about the return?

Slashdot has drunk the KoolAid

[ishmaelflood]

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?

Re:Slashdot has drunk the KoolAid

[ishmaelflood]

Sorry, I misread the article, they are capping the growth in new WT installation for the next 6 years to about 80% of recent growth rates, and are building several new coal plants, whether that results in a net reduction in % windpower depends on economic growth achieved, ie crystal ball.

Stupid argument

[m.dillon]

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

Re:WUWT has a more FUD take on the calculations...

[AchilleTalon]

Well, forget WUWT and you will see there is not much calculations neither in the original claim and in fact, there is a big warning sign in the text, something the cost has not been taken into account in the evaluation but mandatory for their hypothesis to hold, here it is:

"Wind turbines are frequently touted as the answer to sustainable electricity production especially if coupled to high-capacity storage for times when the wind speed is either side of their working range."

So, they presume the high-capacity storage exists and it has zero cost. Seems to me a bit optimistic.

Germany

[mdsolar]

The price of electricity is falling in Germany owing to renewable energy. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... They like wind power.

What's up with the plant link?

[maccodemonkey]

"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.

Crap post

[Anarchduke]

Watts up with that looks like a Republican astroturf site dedicated to debunking climate science.