they aren't farms they are an industrial complex. Dont BS the name. Big towers of Steel are not farms

David Suzuki might like the idea of wind farms on his beautiful view, but what about people who don't like the look of them? One reason to live in a natural surrounding is to see NATURE not 50 storey government-industry tax dollar gobblers. If wind actually worked, it would be one thing, but each tower costs us 300k per year in artificial support. That amounts to billions.

"but each tower costs us 300k per year in artificial support"

Speaking of support, support that number with a reference, please.

Would You Own a Windmill?

Cost $2 million. Expected return on investment ~ about 15% sounds
good for a large corporation. So that means that a wind turbine just
has to clear about $300,000 per year to make money. Easy. After all
wind is free.

1.5 MW turbines stand 40 stories tall, but on average you can expect
to only get about 20% or so use out of them - the rest of the time
the wind is not blowing, or they are down for maintenance. They run
365 days per year, 24 hours per day * 20% of the time, so 1752 hours
per year. Electricity costs 10 cents per kwh at home, but 1/2 of that
is for transmission. The other 5 cents is for the power. 5 cents is
the retail price. You will only get 2 to 3 cents, as you own a source
of electricity that can't be turned on as demand requires. Say 2.5 cents. In
total your $2 million investment makes 1.5MW*365*24*20%*0.025 = $66
thousand per year. Wow, that is not much money. But you still have to
maintain the turbine. Good luck doing that for $66 thousand a year,
after lightning, wind and sun do their damage. (The maintenance of turbines
in north america has been a nightmare). Why, then all the turbines going
up? The answer is government money - $300 000 of it per turbine per year.

So now you are happy. You get to charge 11 cents per kwh, get cheques, depreciation
allowances, tax breaks, and more. In Ontario, the government pays 11c per
kwh for wind, which for my example is $289k. Tax breaks are huge.
You get to write off the entire complex in 5 yrs. That means you will be
paying far less in taxes on the profits that you get from selling the wind energy.
In the US, there are different rates and different tax breaks, but the simple
way to look at it is that a large corp. wants 15% ROI and then look at the value of the electricity.

I think wind CAN work. We just need to get the government out of it,
and let the 'industry' cool off from this overheated tax dollar grab.
There are so many better ways, such as conservation and
geothermal that can and do work.

Wind is popular because it shows up on the horizon, and makes city people feel good.
Wind will work in very windy places, with turbines at 1/2 or less the cost today.
Wind turbines cost more than they should due to all the tax dollars
that the government is throwing into it.

You can't compare wind power prices/value with natural gas power.
Natural gas turns on when you want it. Wind is usually off when you want it,
eg: Summer high pressure cells are the hottest weather, and there is usually no wind.
The 'real' value of wind power is how much the market would pay for intermittent
random power, which has to be less than baseline.

Wait ...so now wind power is NOT a good thing? or is it only good for "them people in the flyover"

"The answer is government money - $300 000 of it per turbine per year."

You still haven't supported this assertion with a link to reputable source - you're just repeating what you said. And are you Tom Andersen, the person who wrote that "Would You Own a Windmill?" comment on a couple of sites?

As for the rest of those assumptions, they are not descriptive of the reality I've seen in places like Buffalo Ridge, and doesn't match the data in factsheets like this one:
http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/EconomicsOfWind-Feb2005.pdf

"The answer is government money - $300 000 of it per turbine per year."

You still haven't supported this assertion with a link to reputable source - you're just repeating what you said. And are you Tom Andersen, the person who wrote that "Would You Own a Windmill?" comment on a couple of sites?

As for the rest of those assumptions, they are not descriptive of the reality I've seen in places like Buffalo Ridge, and doesn't match the data in factsheets like this one:
http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/EconomicsOfWind-Feb2005.pdf

Knobsturner sound like he's quoting junk science/anti-windmill to me.

Don't worry. When Ted Kennedy dies, all of New England will be able to gain 20 or 30 years of continuous electrical power just by burning his liver.

Don't worry. When Ted Kennedy dies, all of New England will be able to gain 20 or 30 years of continuous electrical power just by burning his liver.

The problems with that awea paper:
1) 35% uptime assumed (no one has got 20% in large scale after maintenance.)

2) Installation cost does not include transmission.

3) Price: 4 c is too high, but take that

4) gets gov 2c grant wrong, calls it 1.5

5) glosses over 5 year write down - which generates as much money as the electricity

From the American Bar Association, which in mid-2004, established a "Renewable Energy Resources Committee."8 During a December 15, 2004, teleconference, Ed Feo of Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, LLP pointed out that 2/3 of the economic value of wind projects come from tax breaks.

It is complicated and difficult to dig up all the tax breaks and grants that a large corp gets for adding wind, but there is a simple way:

Invest 2 million dollars: you need 300k return every year to attract large corporations. The electricity that a windmill makes might pay for the maintenance. The rest has to come from taxpayers. That is simple math.

You can wish something to be true, but that will not make it true. The US wastes more electricity than anyone on Earth - why not start there?

--Tom

Here is a reference.
http://www.awea.org/board.html

The AWEA is supported by GE, FLP, Goldman Sachs, etc...

"Invest 2 million dollars: you need 300k return every year to attract large corporations. The electricity that a windmill makes might pay for the maintenance. The rest has to come from taxpayers. That is simple math."

That may be simple math, but you're pulling your assumptions out of thin air. If you're going to go off half-cocked on the economics of something, it would serve your position a heck of a lot better if you had real data to back it up. This is an issue area I'm well-acquainted with, so I'm quite comfortable with detailed figures.

For reference, take a look at the hourly wind speed data for Lake Benton:
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KPQN/2006/4/10/DailyHistory.html

"You can wish something to be true, but that will not make it true."

I could say the same to you. Prove your point, don't just throw out numbers without references.

"The US wastes more electricity than anyone on Earth - why not start there?"

The two aren't mutually exclusive. No matter how efficient you make end-use, there's still going to be electricity demand. Might as well be as clean as possible.

Also, in your calculations, are you covering pollution/health costs from competing modalities, as well as their existing subsidies? I mean, you seem like you want to be thorough, so it seems that since the government is intervening in the market, and also ends up paying a lot of the costs of "externalities", that would help to cover that.

"The AWEA is supported by GE, FLP, Goldman Sachs, etc..."

So? They've been around for over 3 decades and have a wide variety of members - almost 1,000 of them.

I'd be very curious to see some sources, too.

Here in Quebec, electricity is about half the price that it is in the rest of North-America, yet wind makes sense, so I can't imagine it losing money in markets where the price of the kw/h is double or triple.

What assumptions come out of mid air?

I _repeat_: point out errors in here:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_costs_of_electricity.htm

Mr Schleede has attempted to come at the problem the hard way - by listing all the state and federal aid that these large corporations get.

I know that it is much easier to just look at the capital cost, and know the rate of return that makes a power company and players like Goldman Sachs line up to install these things. Don't believe me. Look it up. 2 million and 15% return are correct.

The money all comes from having good lawyers, not good wind. The money that is being wasted on wind could be put to real use, like increasing the building code, ground source heat pumps for cooling, etc.

The wind lobby has a lot of people hoodwinked into giving money to their clients.

Read about it. Don't just read press releases by New York lobbyists.

Good power production decisions cannot be done by politicians. Wind fits todays politics, so it is funded. It's your money.

Just because you like the idea, doesn't mean that it will work.

Thanks for the reference to that confused article on that random website. It seems to contradict a number of your assumptions about capacity utilization, as well as costs. If these things are going to be up for 30 years, you can't just take the front-loaded depreciation acceleration and then believe that extends over the useful life of the equipment. The PTC - same thing.

As for all of your most recent comments, they're all just rhetoric -- no facts.

Get back to me when your facts are organized and come from a reputable source.

"Wind fits todays politics"

That's a good one -- renewable energy fits the politics of a party that's driven primarily by the extractive industries. I mean, there's a "whopping" $38 million devoted to wind energy R&D from the Feds on an annual basis.

Want to compare that with the perks for nukes in the energy bill, or how much the DOE has subsidized that industry over the years? Want to talk about strip mining and blowing the tops off of mountains? Or maybe we can talk about "defense" expenditures that secure oil resources?

It's luaghable to compare such a minor factor in the energy picture and ignore how distorted the energy markets have been for years with the polluting fuels.

I really wonder why you have such a problem with wind.

So, let's say we get things as efficient as they can be. How shall we make our electricity? What's your idea?

Oh, Mr. Schleede, who wrote that piece, is a Nuke and Nixon man?

http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/guides/Finding%20Aids%5CSchleede,%20Glenn%20-%20Papers.htm

Interesting.

Also former VP of the National Coal Association.

That's much better than "press releases by New York lobbyists."

:)

More on Mr. Schleede.

Advisor to "Consumer Alert" (funded by the likes of Chevron and Phillip Morris):
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Consumer_Alert

Part of Cheney's Energy Task Force (ie, he's a dreaded lobbyist):
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/energy_task_force/nrdcmasterlist_9902partysplit.asp

Tells people in Wisconsin wind power is going to kill their views and reduce their property values:
http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=80

Tied to the "National Consumer Coaltion" and the global-warming deniers of the "Cooler Heads Coalition":
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Consumer_Coalition

Widely published on the Heartland Institute website:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Glenn+Schleede%22+site:heartland.org

Thinks the Kyoto Protocol would "spell disaster for families and communities":
http://www.pacificresearch.org/press/rel/1998/pr98-04-16.html

I think we have the bases covered on Mr. Schleede.

The tax write offs do stop after 5 years, at which point they will all sell the wind farms to each other, and start the depreciation - tax evasion cycle again. The 2c PTC credit is a small amount of money that the lawyers thought consumers would accept as a premium up-charge on wind power. It is a public relations campaign. The real money is in all the tax loopholes.

I do not share views with Mr Schleede on many things. But he is right about wind. He has actually worked in the power business for 30 years, is now retired, and he does NOT have a multimillion dollar lobbiest wind site set up for him.

Yeah, his html skills suck. I guess only pretty web sites are truly working for the environment.

Here is how we make our electricity in the future.
1) Hydro. Hydro is already a renewable resource that supplies a lot of power.

2) Nukes. Yeah. They don't pollute. They produce power cheaply and efficiently. The total numbers of deaths from nuclear power is like almost 0 compared to how many die choking on air pollution spit out by coal and cars. Also remember all the people who die extracting the oil, coal and nat gas. Nukes generate waste, and the Nuclear industry actually wants to _deal_ with their waste, which the coal plants, cars and other fossil fuels don't do. Its scary stuff. But there is not much of it. And don't forget that it eventually decays, which is more than you can say for all the plastic we thow out each day. Don't go ballistic here. Chernobl was a complete disaster, but still killed very few people.
Can we afford ANY deaths? Well - people die doing any job. Life has risks. How many coal miners have died? Oli workers?

3) Geothermal - perhaps geothermal generation, perhaps geothermal cooling. perhaps both.

4) I don't know how many times I have said it today but WIND POWER MIGHT WORK! Just get the government out of it. Without the gov involved, only real wind projects will get off the groud. It can only make a small contribution, but even 3% would help.

5) Other new tech. Perhaps solar will drop in price suddenly. Perhaps there will be an invention. I don't know. It took a hundred years to get into this mess, and a few windmills erected to make your politicians happy will not change things.

The thing is, just because you want something to happen does not mean it will. Wind will never work when it's not blowing, which happens on those really hot summer days when demand goes through the roof.

I don't want to see the tops ripped off of mountains, but all wind will do is wreck the remaining natrual places we have.

Wind will never make base load power. Coal is used for base load power. They are hardly connected at all. When you use wind energy, you usually use less natural gas or hydro power, or often you just have to dump wind energy. Sometimes the wind blows and no one wants the power. You can see that for electricity, only coal leads to carbon emissions. And all generation is less than 1/3 of all carbon produced.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg99rpt/carbon.html

My point is that perhaps there are no easy pollution free ways to make electricity right now. (100 nuclear plants would not hurt though). We can better spend the billions on conservation, and save more tons of carbon.

Personally, I am changing my house over from carbon based heat to geothermal - all without government money. Geothermal makes economic and enviromental sense.

Also remember that most carbon used comes not from electricity gen, but from cars, home heating, and industry.

You have not provided ONE single number refuting any claims made by me. How much is an installed GE 1.5MW turbine? What rate of return do corporations want on investment, if not 15%? Where are there large numbers of turbines working at 30%+ capacity? Where are there people willing to pay 3x as much for power?
How much less than $60k per year can you maintain a turbine for? What is the real market price of wind energy if not 2.5c?

The calculations are simple. They are just not up on the lobbiest web sites.

knobsturner: you are not comparing things equally. you are forgetting the fact that the ontario government has been paying billions upon billions of dollars to the restoration of the bruce and pickering reactors. if i remember right it is something around 20 billion.

the federal government invested nearly 4 billion in the hibernia program off the coast of newfoundland.

why is it bad for wind power to get government support when nuclear and petro does too? they just have initial costs that are seperate from such a simple way of making electricity like wind, where a plant makes power, you don't need to buy resources, not counting tat the resources are government funded too

Even if wind power did cost more than nuclear, coal, and oil, wouldn't it be worth investing in just for the sake of safety and sustainability?

It would be worth it to me.

"You have not provided ONE single number refuting any claims made by me."

Sure I have. For one, your capacity utilization assumption is way off. Even Nuke n Coal Schleede gives higher numbers than you do.

And let me give you a little clue about "simple math". If you buy a depreciating asset and then get a $300,000 income stream from it (which you still haven't shown that they do, but we'll leave that), then that isn't a "15% return". You would have a 15% return if the principal were unchanged, but in this case it isn't.

Basically you've shown that you have a predisposed bias towards nukes, which are RIDICULOUSLY subsidized. Somehow this doesn't make you go into fits about the government distoring the real price of its power.

"I don't want to see the tops ripped off of mountains, but all wind will do is wreck the remaining natrual places we have."

Apparently you need to come out here and we'll go out to Buffalo Ridge, then west through South Dakota, then up to North Dakota. If we get out of the car, your face will be sandblasted - guaranteed. Then you can tell me all about what "natural place" we're "wrecking" by putting windmills there.

You're coming from the perspective of someone who is against windmill projects out in the ocean. I read some of your pieces. But now you're basically dissing all windpower with flimsy numbers because you don't want a windmill ruining your ocean view.

If you really are concerned about these issues, I suggest you get your numbers organized and accurate, and do so as well for competing modalities.

You obviously don't have a background in finance or economics, so it might behoove you to work with someone who does. But you're not going to sway me in your favor with silly rhetoric repeated endlessly (like "just because you want something to be true, doesn't mean it is") and making blanket statements about how much rate of return a corporation expects -- which is absurd. Return is related to risk, and the point of Mr. Feo's presentation is that the tax effects of these investments can be suitable for certain types of investors.

How this all becomes this grand conspiracy of "New York lobbyists, GE, etc" is beyond me. And how the subsidies for this segment of the industry are somehow out of line compared to your preferred modalities also escapes me.

And please don't do more disservice to your argument by hitching yourself to Mr. Schleede's wagon, especially if your point seems to be that we shouldn't listen to money-tainted arguments set forth by biased people. And the website that writing was on wasn't Mr. Schleede's, so any comment about its poor formatting has nothing to do with him.

Get your facts straight, and get them from reliable sources. Then we'll talk. Until then, you're wasting your time.

You still are giving NO numbers. If my utilization capacity is low, then show me a large multiyear old wind system with greater than 25% capacity. I mean like over 100 turbines.

"One party that is highly critical of wind power is E.ON Netz, the owner of the grid system that includes 44 per cent of Germany's installed wind-farm capacity. Last year it published a report (summarised in Downtown on November 6) saying that the electricity generated by its wind farms averaged only 11 per cent of capacity."

http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-03-24/windpower.htm

http://www.bhcc.ca/financial_post_article.htm

The charming wind turbine on Toronto's waterfront, built at a cost of $1.7-million by Toronto Hydro and its green friends, has an uptime of about 15% to 20%. In two years, it has produced 1,012 MW hours of power per annum, enough to supply 85 homes. This translates into a capital cost per home of $20,000, which probably makes it Canada's most uneconomic power source. But it makes passersby feel good.

Hydro Quebec installed a large wind farm with 30% capacity factor expected from the experts. In actual fact, they got 16.51% capacity.
Memoire_GroupeAxor_23avr04.pdf

The capacity factor that wind proponents throw around is for ideal conditions WITH NO BREAKDOWS or maintenance assumed.

The closest wind farm to me is brand new 1.5 MW GE turbines, and they are having a real tough time getting them to work. It has turned into a one year delay. - year 1 - Capcity 0.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip38.htm
case study: West Denmark West Denmark (the main peninsula part) is the most intensely wind-turbined part of the planet, with 1.74 per 1000 people - 4700 turbines totaling 2315 MWe, 1800 MWe of which has priority dispatch and power must be taken by the grid when it is producing. Total system capacity is 6850 MWe and maximum load during 2002 was 3700 MWe, hence a huge 81% margin. In 2002, 3.38 billion kWh were produced from the wind, a load factor of 16.8%. The peak wind output was 1813 MWe on 23 January, well short of the total capacity, and there were 54 days when the wind output supplied less than 1%

So where is 30+ % capacity? - answer - in marketing materials produced by GE and friends.

http://kirbymtn.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_kirbymtn_archive.html
Consequently, there are very compelling technical and financial reasons to choose a simple combustion turbine that is only 40% efficient if the power plant is forced to cycle because of the operation of a wind generator on the same electrical grid. Using the 26.0% wind capacity factor from California in 2000, one can calculate the amount of fossil fuel required to operate a combustion turbine for 74.0% of the time in order to replace the missing power from the wind generator, and compare it to the amount of fossil fuel required to operate a 58% efficient combined cycle power plant 100% of the time. The more efficient combined cycle can now be used since it does not have to vary its output to accommodate the wind generator. The result is that the combination of wind generator and combustion turbine uses 7.2% more fossil fuel than the combined cycle. That’s right. The introduction of the wind generator causes more fossil fuel to be burned not less. That means more pollution, not less. That means more carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere, not less. That means more dependence on imported fossil fuels, not less.

--Tom