The Simple Arithmetic Of Wind Power
Nations have spent hundreds of billions of dollars hoping to replace coal and natural gas to no avail. Australians and Germans have suffered from the government’s decisions the most.
They now have sky-high energy costs and frequent blackouts. Both are returning to coal with as little fanfare as possible.
Why is this true? The answer is the little-known and less well-understood Ciccone/Lehr electric power Rule of Thumb which states:
“All Solar and Wind Power on an Electric Grid Must Be Backed Up With an Equal or Greater Amount of Fossil Fuel Power Running on Standby 100 percent of The Time.”
Although, I will admit that Germany thinks they can manage with only 80 percent back up which one has to doubt as we have seen their electric costs triple.
Nonsensical as it may seem, President Biden’s plan for a climate-friendly electric grid depends on the ability to construct thousands of miles of power lines to bring energy from the wind and sun-rich states across the nation to replace all the electricity currently supplied by coal and natural gas.
As the sun sets in New York and the wind calms, California may be able to keep its lights on for a few more hours before all goes dark. Regardless, Biden wants to harness all the nation’s wind without even understanding that the landmass of the contiguous 48 states is not large enough to fit all the wind turbines required.
The cost of wind power can never be competitive with coal and natural gas, and their industry only exists due to huge government subsidies that keep wind and solar companies rich and the public poor.
While we should be opposing all money spent on the wind, the deck has been stacked against us by the wind power lobby. These lobbyists have convinced state legislatures to require electric utilities to obtain some of their power from the wind ‘supposedly.’ This legislation is called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). “Supposedly” is my keyword because, for every kilowatt-hour of wind power, the utility must build additional coal or natural gas power to fully back up the wind capacity they added to their system.
So the net gain to the utility is increased cost, not increased energy, which ends up on the monthly bill to its customers.
Let’s look at why this is so. As we know, the wind is consistently inconsistent or better described as intermittent. In a word, it is not reliable. No electric grid can afford to be unreliable. Our three electric grids, East, West, and Texas, all operate at 60 hertz of electric power. A hertz is a single electric cycle of alternating current per second. No grid can vary by more than half a hertz for any period, meaning 60.5 hertz or 59.5 hertz are its limits of variability.
Beyond these limits, the system will crash, which means all down the line equipment will shut off or, at times, may actually explode.
This has never happened before. If it did, the cost to society would be in the billions and the loss of life in the thousands. In February 2021, the Texas grid came within 5 minutes of crashing. The grid was only saved by unloading the huge power users from the system.
This is why all electric utilities sign agreements with large users giving them the right to pull the plug on them in times of emergency. An emergency is the loss of balance between the electric power generated and the electricity the system is demanding.
Let’s look at why wind is even more intermittent than you could imagine. Every turbine has a range of wind speeds, usually between 30 miles per hour (mph) and 55 mph, in which it will produce its maximum rated electric output. At slower speeds, the production falls off considerably.
Physics tells us that when you double wind speed, the power of the wind increases by a factor of 8 (that’s 2 cubed 2x2x2). Conversely, when the wind speed is halved, the wind turbine output power declines 8 fold.
Another poorly understood aspect of wind turbines is their size. Wind output is essentially limited by the land area used to harness it. You can have very large turbines with very long blades in small numbers, which will not interfere with each other. Or you can have smaller turbines in larger numbers and get the same kilowatt-hours of power from the land.
It should be obvious that turbines must be spaced at precise distances apart not to interfere with each turbine’s ability to capture the wind. Unfortunately, the country is moving toward bigger and bigger turbines that will make disposal of these giant blades nearly impossible.
To give a sense of scale, to replace the energy from one average natural gas power plant sitting on 4 acres of land would require 2500 acres of large wind turbines. Each turbine has a rated capacity of the number of Megawatts of electricity (commonly 2.5 megawatts) they could produce if they turned 24/7 at the most optimum revolutions per minute.
The wind industry projects the annual output of their turbines to be 30 to 40 percent of capacity. However, experience for the past decade indicates that annual outputs are more commonly between 15 and 30 percent. For example, when 137 US wind projects self-reported to the US Energy Agency in 2003, their average capacity was 26.9 percent. Nine years later it rose to 30.4 percent.
However, 27 European Union countries reported their efficiency in 2007 to be only 13 percent. The saddest reality is that wind turbines produce no power 70 percent of the time.
When the industry describes its total capacity, it adds up the plated capacity number of all existing turbines. This is really ridiculous. Having now burdened you with a variety of numbers relating to our 60,000 wind turbines across America.
But keep in mind as we debate how much a wind turbine can produce, my purpose for this 3 part tutorial is to convince all readers that all wind turbines add up to no contribution whatever to America’s electricity for its cost. This is a hard sell to make as it seems unreasonable to the average person.
But it is no different than blaming humans for the planet’s temperature while ignoring nature.
See more here: papundits
Header image: Power Technology
About the author: Dr Jay Lehr is a Senior Science Analyst at the CFACT site, and he is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books.
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Allan Shelton
| #
Thanks for that…….
Reply
Trish
| #
Sound information from a scientist Dr. Lehr who ACTUALLY studies the problem vs. ego, incompetence, low iQ masters of politics, media, tech blast who are making the decisions and driving false narratives about the complexities of energy which they know NOTHING about. What could go wrong?
Reply
Rick
| #
As a Texan in the DFW area, I witnessed first hand the rolling outages (which in some cases lasted days of outage at a time) during the coldest winter on record. With no power, there’s no heat, with no heat hundreds of thousands of Texas home experienced burst water pipes and flooded homes (including mine).
I read in papers how California was experiencing rolling brownouts, and thanked God I didn’t live in CA. Few people here realized that the same folly that gripped CA utilities was hard at work destroying our Texas grid as well, with so-called “renewable”, “sustainable” power. Last winter was a wake-up call to us all what the utility commissions have done in, essentially, the cover of darkness to reck upon us.
Reply
Randy Wester
| #
“The saddest reality is that wind turbines produce no power 70 percent of the time.”
No, they produce, on average, 30 percent of their rated output. Like a car’s engine, sometimes they’re delivering less than 100% of rated power at times when it is less windy.
Really, early, small European wind turbines in 2007 spent less time producing electricity than today’s 100 meter tall monsters? Geez, no kidding, eh, do you figure the technology might have improved?
Reply
richard
| #
A car engine can run 24/7. Remind me again what happens when the wind doesn’t blow.Of course it’s back to coal for Germany.
Reply
Charlie
| #
The other thing people don’t think about is industrial processes and manufacturing. Many of the machines and tools (furnaces, mills, kilns, pot lines just to name a few) cannot be started and stopped. In some cases, to do so can completely destroy the plant (an aluminum pot-line for instance). The move to renewables will force still more manufacturing to other countries where such insanity is not taking place. There isn’t enough material on the planet to make batteries to provide for this huge power requirement, not to mention the amount of money that would be required. The more you examine the real world of energy requirements, the more you realize that the move to renewables for much of today’s economy is a world of rainbows and unicorns.
Reply
Tom
| #
Green energy is purely insane in every way. The only thing that might make sense is solar panels for homes and businesses that have a good deal of sun available much of the year. That excludes well over half the country.
Reply