ebb and flow ... Overblown wind plan just hot air
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Michael J Economides
  Wednesday, March 19, 2008

If you have a hankering to see England’s green and pleasant land or Britain’s rugged coastline, you shouldn’t wait too long to visit. That is, before it disappears under the swirling of thousands of massive 400ft tall wind turbines that the British government plans to erect. Recently, UK industry secretary John Hutton shocked many by proposing an unprecedented 25 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity, adding to the 8GW already in development. A grand plan that could power all of Britain’s 25 million homes by as early as 2020.

Wind seems to be blowing in the mind of the politically correct and those on the environmentalist bandwagon but the cost is going to be huge. No companies will plunge into it without massive government subsidies and, if actually built, power reliability will take a nosedive.

The scale of Britain’s commitment to wind power can be grasped if one considers that the 8GW capacity under construction alone will give Britain world leadership in installed wind power production.

Wind power has become the energy source du jour, darling of (most) environmental groups and governments.

Currently, just 2% of the UK’s power comes from renewable energy sources, with wind providing less than half a gigawatt. So Hutton’s grand plan would mean an astonishing leap for the British wind power industry. Of the 8GW capacity currently planned, the London Array – 271 wind turbines to be built in the Thames estuary – will be the world’s largest plant providing 1GW capacity on its own. The London Array should be operational by 2014 and is expected to power around 750,000 homes. But it would be upstaged by an even bigger project currently under consideration: the $6 billion Atlantic Array – a proposed 350 turbines off England’s south-west coast.

John Hutton’s grand plan would literally change the face of Britain. He told BBC TV’s Politics Show that it will mean around 7000 turbines, the equivalent of one turbine every half-mile around the entire coast of Britain. His justification: ‘There is no way of making the shift to low-carbon technology without there being change and for that change to be visible and evident to people.’ So there will be an enormous aesthetic environmental, as well as economic, cost – a cost driven primarily by the belief that man’s carbon emissions is the main cause of the 1° or so of global warming the world has experienced over the last century.

While the renewables-at-any-cost lobbies applauded Hutton’s announcement, the more realistic wind energy groups were a bit more circumspect.Welcoming the commitment to the goal of greater wind power sufficiency, Gordon Edge, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) director of economics and markets, called the government’s plan ‘pie in the sky’. Edge’s view was that the plan suffered from one major flaw: private capital investment will not be forthcoming. Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, added his opinion that the British government was ‘deluding itself on a grand scale. There will be no race by investors to build offshore wind farms.’ These voices recognized that, to date, the taxpayer has picked up the wind power tab.

The recommended ‘load factor’ to make a wind farm economically viable and efficient is just over 30%. However, many of Britain’s onshore farms have been running at around 20%, with some, in urban areas, dropping as low as 9%. Over-reliance on wind power will result both in major power failures across the UK and an increase in electricity bills of up to 50%. While nothing comes close to the capriciousness of nature itself, the industry also still suffers from some severe technical difficulties.

In August 2007, Germany’s Der Spiegel reported the rising incidence of ‘mishaps, breakdowns and accidents’ associated with ever-larger turbines. When one rotor blade broke away in Oldenburg, northern Germany, leading to an examination of six others, the results proved so alarming that the authorities immediately ordered four to be shut down. The Der Spiegel article noted that manufacturer’s promises that turbines would last for 20 years have proven hollow. German manufacturers’ cannot build turbines fast enough to meet current demand. By late 2007, the German wind power industry had expanded by 40%, according to the German Wind Energy Association, providing work for 74,000 people. But the ‘success’ of the industry is not allowing time for proper stress testing procedures.

The bottom line is that the renewables debate, and investment in it, is as much about ideology and political belief as it is about economics and environmental issues. When the real cost of turbine power as a major player toward our future power needs is assessed, the answer just ain’t ‘blowing in the wind’. OE

Michael J Economides is a professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, and editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune. Peter Glover is a UK-based writer and journalist. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect OE’s position.

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