Talk:Wind power/Archive 4

Capacity Factor - Misleading
Within the intoduction to the article is stated "At the end of 2006, worldwide capacity of wind-powered generators was 73.9 gigawatts."however further on in the article in the 'Wind Energy' section subsection 'Capacity Factor' is stated "Since wind speed is not constant, a wind generator's annual energy production is never as much as its nameplate rating multiplied by the total hours in a year. The ratio of actual productivity in a year to this theoretical maximum is called the capacity factor. A well-sited wind generator will have a capacity factor of about 35%." Furthermore throughout this article are numerous instances of capacity figures that are almost all silent on whether this is a peak or average capacity number. For a general reader this lack of detail is misleading, particulary because of the large difference between average and peak (35% and 100%). This is not a criticism of Wind Power but simply accuracy. These same issues are also applicable to other electrical power generation method's capacity factors, for instance coal powered plant capacity changes due to cooling tower effectivness variablity with temperature, humidity and water availability. I propose the following:

Capacity figures be prefixed or postfixed with peak eg. "worldwide peak capacity of wind-powered generators was 73.9 gigawatts" or "73.9 gigawatts (peak)" or include both peak and average eg. (73.9/25.9) or (73.9 peak / 25.9 average) Although this is dealt with in a specific section 'Capacity Factor' it is not applied throughout the article as it should be for accuracy and clarity, and this limits the development of the article in the areas of, for instance, differences in load factors seasonally or in different regions or between land and sea based sites. What do you think?

Theo Pardilla 03:03, 6 January 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Theo Pardilla (talk • contribs)


 * I object. You can't add all the wind turbines in the world and assume an average capacity factor. No grid-connected generating plant operates at 100% nameplate rating for 100% of a year. The convention in the electrical industry is always to give the nameplate rating of generators of a plant (less, if necessary, plant internal conumption) as the capacity, and then discuss capacity factors as relevant. A total rating (megawatts, gigawatts) is necessarily a power rating, and the capacity factor gives the ratio of actual annual energy production compared with nameplate rating multipled by 8760 hours/year. I suggest the "expand" tag is unnecessary and should be removed. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:14, 6 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Whilst I agree with Wtshymanski's statement that all grid connected generating plants operate at sub 100% nameplate and continuous rates, articles are intended for a non specialist or non technical readership and the quantification of power output is deceptive therefore as it does not specify that this figure is a maximum peak number. This differs qualitatively from most other grid connected generation technologies in that its maximum long term average is around 1/3rd of its peak or nameplate rating, due primarily to reliance on uncontrollable wind patterns, whereas gas, coal or nuclear can have a maximum long term average of around 90%. Maximum capacity factors for wind power will of course depend upon local and regional wind patterns and although you may not want to 'assume' an average global capacity factor you can calculate an estimate based upon general scientific models and refine it as needed. The 1/3rd figure seems, according to the literature, to be about right. However this does not obviate the need for a subsection about Capacity Factors. Sure you can run a gas generator at sub 90% rates say 25 or 10, but the inherent maximum capacity is around 90 or so and is near enough to 100 to not need to give prominence to capacity factory clarification. You havent addressed my main point that an unclarified power rating maximum is misleading for a general audience, and whilst a section in the article devoted to capacity factors is necessary, it does not relieve the requirement to prominently differentiate peak and maximum average power. Would your position still hold if maximum capacity factor was 3% or .3%? It should be self evident that a figure circa 33% is different from a circa 90% figure by a substantative order of magnitude to the extent of qualitative difference, and whilst you may well agree with this observation I believe that it follows from this that prominence be given to differentiation at the point of enumeration of power rating for the purposes of clearly conveying these differences to a general reader. Electrical industry power rating conventions are based on base load continuous generation at high rates of 70, 80 or 90% ranges and are therefore inapplicable to windpower in exactly the same way.

--Theo Pardilla 14:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
 * That was very long. Electrical industry practice is to give the nameplate rating of the generators, less any in-house consumption. Intermittency is very prominent in the article now. No-one but an oil sheik can afford to run a natural gas-fired plant at 100% capacity factor at current NG prices, not while there's any more economical base load (desalination plants are the obvious exception, but they tend to be in the Mideast gas-producing countries for just that reason). "Maximum average" is meaningless in this context. If the capacity factor was 3% no-one would be building wind plants. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:08, 11 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The capacity factor issue for wind power is qualitatively different than for traditional power generation and I can see no downside in being extra clear when the article is talking about peak power vs annual average.--agr (talk) 17:37, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The capacity factor is defined the same way for all sources and so is directly comparable. Most hydro plants, in my experience, do not have enough water capacity to run at full nameplate output for a year - they are sized to harvest energy when it's available and produce at lower levels the rest of the year. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:47, 11 January 2008 (UTC)


 * It's fine to cite nameplate capacities when describing wind in a vacuum, but if you're comparing a 20% capacity factor wind farm with a 50% capacity factor hydro plant with an 85% capacity factor nuclear plant, it's certainly misleading to only cite the nameplate capacities. — Omegatron 10:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
 * "Wind in a vacuum" is a delightful phrase I'm sure I'll never see used anywhere but on the Wikipedia. Agree, annual production is a better measure of contribution to an energy balance than capacity, but everyone reports capacity. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

You seem to have missed the points.

No-one opposes clarifying prominently capacity factors when there is no downside except ideological, inertial or cognitive, no-one. Simply reciting "Electrical industry practice is to give the nameplate rating of the generators" is an inadequate substitute for refinement. Wind power can never provide capacity factors averaged over the long term in the 70s 80s or 90s as its simply an inherent limitation from variable wind patterns and whilst there may well be some areas of the world where its theoretically possible to have much higher capacity factors than 35% such as the Antactic its simply impossible almost everywhere else. No-one thinks that fuel costs are relevant to physical, intrinsic capacity limitations, No-one. Not even the most profligate wealthy can make the wind blow continuously and they cannot change the laws of physics. Wind is limited to 35% but GHG and Nuclear plants can run at near 100% and are not inherently retarded by physics.

--Theo Pardilla 12:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * A late insertion: I agree with your observation about ground-mounted wind turbines, but airborne wind turbines might actually be able to obtain capacity factors rivaling nuclear power plants, as high-altitude winds are very steady in many parts of the world. --Teratornis (talk) 05:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am completely missing the point. What are you trying to say that the existing (as of January 17,2008) section oncapacity factor does not already say? Barring any naive AIs reading the Wikipedia. I think our readers understand that the wind blows where and when it wills, and the section shows the engineering and economic impact of the wind's variability. (The St. Leon guys told me their capacity factor was 40% in 2006 but I don't have a published reference for that.) --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Capacity factor of a single turbine at some academic institution is not representative of  capacity factors of wind farms financed by cold-eyed accountants watching the bottom line. I suspect real wind farms don't disclose their operating statistics on a real-time basis because this is sensitive commerical information (I'd like to see a real wind farm with a real-time display - not just one turbine!). Nor is a lash-up of solar panels and wind turbines feeding your geodesic dome representative of commercial wind farms, which do not have anything to do with solar panels - the complementarity is only relevant to the geodesic dome crowd, and good luck to 'em. Capacity factor has very littel do do with blade design and *everything* to do with where you put the darn things; even Grandpa's Knob had a 32% capacity factor till it fell apart and that was more than 60 years ago. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:16, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The first reference states: "A reasonable capacity factor would be 0.25 to 0.30. A very good capacity factor would be 0.40." And later: "In recent years, the U.S. wind industry has begun using seemingly insignificant refinements in blade airfoil shapes to increase annual energy output from 10 to well over 25 percent." The siting is important, but for a given location, blade design is extremely important in improving capacity factor. Grandpa's Knob may have been a particularly good location. Find a spot with constant winds, and you can expect a whole lot higher than 40% capacity factor. Be careful not to confuse efficiency with capacity factor. The second reference says that "Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40%." When you give a total range of 20 to 40% it is redundant to say that 40% is obtained from particularly favorable sites. When you say that typical values range from 20 to 40% it is implicit that actual values both exceed and are lower than the endpoints, which is why "particularly favorable" needs to be identified as "more than 40%", not, "at the upper end of the range". This is just plain logic. I'm looking for data from wind farms as well. So far I have a few small turbines, plus the 660 kW turbine. The reference which was deleted says that the best locations are Northern Europe along the North Sea, the southern tip of the South American continent, the island of Tasmania in Australia, the Great Lakes region, and the northeastern and northwestern coasts of North America. You can read that from the abstract, no need to buy the article. The Strait of Magellan is famous for having very constant winds. Put a wind farm there and you will be hugely higher than 40% capacity factor. 199.125.109.38 (talk) 04:48, 26 January 2008 (UTC)


 * For not quite "real-time" but hourly archives, see Ontario system operator's data. Currently five windfarms with capacity and actual average output per hour. There are a few articles on the web that have done some analysis of actual capacity factors, as I recall running consistently 25-30% annually, plus seasonal variation.--Gregalton (talk) 06:17, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Excellent. This is just what I was looking for. Now I need ones for Europe and the United States. This is a massive amount of data to go through, though.

Wind farm      Location              Capacity in MW Capacity factor in 2007 Amaranth I     Township of Melancthon        67.5    30.61% Kingsbridge I  Huron County                  39.6    35.03% Port Burwell   Norfolk and Elgin Counties    99      28.05% Prince I&II    Sault Ste. Marie District    189      28.82%

Wind Power in Ontario

199.125.109.38 (talk) 08:31, 26 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, I haven't found any sources as detailed as this for other geographies. You may also want to keep in mind/take a look at when these came online - I believe three of the four came online in 2006.
 * This is not so much a question for talkpage, but I have interest in doing some more detailed analysis of the coincidence / correlation with other generating sources/demand/prices. I don't, however, have the xml/coding skills. You can talkpage me if this is the type of thing you're interested in.
 * I should have noted that there is lots of other data, but raw and overviews, available on how the IESO looks at all the aspects of wind integration in a good-sized system.--Gregalton (talk) 11:38, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

intermittency in intro
"Wind energy is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and reduces toxic atmospheric and greenhouse gas emissions if used to replace fossil-fuel-derived electricity. The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power at low to moderate penetration levels.[4]"

Although I heavily favor wind power, I still sense how twisted-POV this last sentence of the intro is (it denies a problem without ever acknowledging the problem). It would be much more straight-forward and honest to say instead something like: "The variability (intermittency) of the wind is a potential problem, especially when it supplies a large percentage of the power in a system, but ameliorating techniques have been developed that are adequate in most applications." -69.87.203.168 (talk) 03:22, 24 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree. I also strongly support windpower but the last paragraph of the intro seems too POV. I'm not sure any comments on the advantages or disadvantages of wind power need to be addressed in the opening introduction as they are sufficiently addressed later. I think this last paragraph should be removed completely (and/or moved elsewhere?).Ga2re2t (talk) 21:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Do you have a problem with the current wording "The intermittency of wind seldom creates insurmountable problems when using wind power to supply up to roughly 10% of total electrical demand (low to moderate penetration), but presents challenges that are not yet fully solved when wind is to be used for a larger fraction of demand. " It seems accurate and well sourced.--agr (talk) 16:49, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I have a problem with it. The reference is a year old. Later on in the article it states that Minnesota did a study that found that the cost of 25% wind was minimal and later on that Denmark gets 20% of their electricity from wind. The lead needs to be rewritten. I believe that more recently 70% has also been considered, combined with solar which tends to have a reverse intermittency from wind, and supplemented with pumped storage. 199.125.109.108 (talk) 02:33, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Intermittency is usually brought up as the ultimate deal-killer on wind power. However this is like saying that the lack of railways were an obstruction to the introduction of rail transport, which could not run on the regular roads, or that the lack of power lines was an obstacle to the widespread use of electricity.  It is not an insurmountable problem, and many solutions exist. First is having a large grid system, which evens out the system. Second to the transmission problems in this, is the HVDC system proposed in Europe. Third is the construction of a system of new pumped storage systems and fourth is the management of demand, using real-time pricing according to supply.  Fifth would be a fast-tracking to produce a viable electric car, by breaking the battery-patent/Chevron logjams and suchlike, allowing cars to be recharged at peak supply times, as well as storage heaters, storage coolers, mobile-phone rechargers, etc etc etc.  Put all these together and you will wipe out any intermittency problems.  Adding Solar Power will also help to manage peak demand during the day.  Lets face it folks, fossils are in the past.  We can live in the problems of the past or we can look for solutions in the future. - Mike  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.147.143.193 (talk) 17:32, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Rest assured, if wind was all the energy source there was, intermittancy solutions would be found. Brute-force solution is building far more capacity than you need for peak demand, and interconnecting it - rather like some hydro systems are built, now. More elegant (less costly) solutions would invovle storage. Intermittency is an economic issue, not a fundamental physical limit. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:39, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Another option is to use excess wind power to generate hydrogen for use in sustainable ammonia production. Currently ammonia production consumes large quantities of natural gas, and that is obviously unsustainable. Eventually we'll have to generate the hydrogen by electrolysis of water. Ammonia plants would be excellent captive users of wind power, since it's easy to store hydrogen on-site to buffer the power input. --Teratornis (talk) 05:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The best way to fix the lead is change 10% to 20%. Low to moderate penetration would be say 5% to 30%. Low penetration would be 1 to 10%. Moderate penetration is definitely not 10%, and since Denmark is having no problem with 20% that is what the lead should say, 20%. Newer studies show that even 60% penetration can be accommodated with no difficulty. See the study about the cost of using 70% for example. The combined power plant developed in Germany used 60.9% wind, 14.3% solar and 24.8% biomass. 0.5% was imported and 4.1% was exported; and 1.4% was lost by sloshing it back and forth in hydrostorage. What they were demonstrating was that Germany can get 100% of electricity from renewable energy. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 07:10, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
 * On intermittancy, have there been any studies on intermittancy on large scale wind-power production ? I can imagine that when the wind doesn't blow in Northern Europe, it would blow in Southern Europe and vice-versa, Just because the earth keeps turning.

Spelling
My dictionary shows complementariness as a noun, but I sure never have heard of it before. Easier to just say "this". Complementarily, the adverb, is a little more familiar, but not much. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 20:02, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

External link: video illustration
Is anybody going to strongly object to me adding a link to this video (requires flash) in the safety section, as a good illustration of what can go wrong? Having looked at WP:EL, you could probably argue either way about whether or not is should be in. Guinness (talk) 12:07, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't know about this - is there some context for the video? Dates, age of machine, owner, location, etc? The fact that a crew turned up to record the event makes me wonder if this wasn't a delibrate trial. Videos of dams bursting, boilers collapsing, and Geiger counters clicking are all well and good but are they relevant to normal operations of the respective energy sources? --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:22, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm planning on starting an article on wind power accidents, and started a list of youtube videos:


 * 1) Denmark turbine exploding from overspeed in a storm:
 * 2) * http://jp.dk/uknews/article1277616.ece
 * 3) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3FZtmlHwcA
 * 4) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
 * 5) Turbine fire (Spain?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKkTUY2slYQ
 * 6) Turbine fire (location?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXcHzi2t4s
 * 7) Turbine fire (Palm Springs, CA) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N4HQv-UyUo
 * 8) Turbine destroyed by lightning along a road
 * 9) * 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCvf61_ebgM
 * 10) * 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpGkTS1CREo
 * 11) Fenner, NY blade failure
 * 12) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eku6hJ-V8Ks
 * 13) Wayne County, PA blade failure
 * 14) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTraL-lVR0E
 * 15) Fire caused by downed wind farm power lines
 * 16) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax5tSd4uWro
 * 1) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax5tSd4uWro

Probably don't want the entire list in this article, of course. :) — Omegatron 23:33, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh and while you are at it how about a list of all automobile accidents? Neither seems to be particularly notable. 4.233.143.3 (talk) 18:12, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
 * List of civilian nuclear accidents, List of military nuclear accidents, List of coal mining disasters, List of mining disasters in Poland, List of accidents and incidents on commercial aircraft, List of rail accidents, List of horse accidents, ... — Omegatron 23:31, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Possible Vandalism?
"CO2 emissions and pollution

Wind power consumes no fuel for continuing operation, and has no emissions directly related to electricity production. Operation does not produce carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, particulates, or any other type of air pollution, as do fossil fuel power sources." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.173.201.59 (talk) 12:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Lopsided coverage?
This article appears to be concentrated on electrical generation from wind turbines, and yet "Wind power" means any form of usable power from wind. There is no mention at all of sailing ships, pumps, balloons and gliding flight for example. Look at the German article to see the difference in coverage. Or have I overlooked a main article on Wind energy? What do editors think about changing the lead to remove this lopsidedness? Also, what about these proposed new sections, derived from the German article? -Wikianon (talk) 16:37, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Physics of wind energy
 * uses of wind energy - sailing, mills, pumps, balloons, thermal gliding flight, electricity generation

I think we need to better define the scope of this Wind power article in relation to the concept of Wind energy - which currently redirects to Wind power. Should Wind power concentrate on man's use of the energy from wind (and maybe electricity generation only)? In which case it seems we need a new "parent" Wind energy article to cover the physical aspects of wind, its distribution, the various wind systems, its kinetic energy, its effect on Earth's environment, and a summary of its use by man with Wind power containing most of what we have here. Or should Wind power be the parent article with subarticles for history of wind energy use, Wind energy power plants, and so forth?

Is there a better subdvision? At present the article is large and 80% of it concentrates on electricity production, and is missing important parts of wind power, not only history.

Looking at the Energy Portal, Solar power is placed as the parent of Photovoltaic electricity and Hydropower is placed as the parent of Hydroelectricity, so it sems logical to have Wind power as the parent article with Wind turbine, Wind farm, and maybe Wind electrical energy as child articles.

I will post a question at Talk:Energy for suggestions. -Wikianon (talk) 22:24, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Wind
 * Wind applications (kites, sailboats, balloons)
 * History of wind power
 * Windmill
 * Wind power
 * Wind farm
 * Wind turbine
 * Windbelt

199.125.109.98 (talk) 08:29, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
 * One way to fix this problem without heavy rewrites to the article is to create one or more navigation templates for the bottom of wind power articles. I'm working on a Template:Wind power now. See some other templates I started earlier: Peak oil and Bioenergy. --Teratornis (talk) 06:04, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * In particular, check out SkySails, a clever use of wind for motive power, which unlike most wind-generated electricity, directly replaces petroleum use in cargo ships. With the oil price increases since 2003 apparently just getting warmed up due to peak oil, reducing the petroleum consumption of cargo ships could soon become critically important. Power kites for towing ships can displace lots of petroleum use while bypassing the standard objections to wind-generated electricity - although I suppose the wind power opponents who haven't gotten the memo that fossil fuels are subject to peaking will probably think of some reason to complain about the technology. --Teratornis (talk) 06:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(undent)Some followup to issues above: --Teratornis (talk) 19:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I made a preliminary navigation template: Wind power, which I am adding to wind power articles.
 * Those who do not read German can generate a fairly usable machine translation into English with this Google translation link:
 * Some other machine translations with Google translation:
 * --Teratornis (talk) 20:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * --Teratornis (talk) 20:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * --Teratornis (talk) 20:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Complementary nature of wind power and solar power
This article isn't about wind farms, it is about wind power. It has long been recognized that solar and wind are complementary and allow higher utilization if they are used together. This needs to be pointed out in the article. Saying it isn't important to the operator of a wind farm is missing the point. It is vitally important to the grid - far more wind power can be utilized if it is complemented with solar farms and pumped hydrostorage. I have added a reference from the Oregonian about a project the local power company is doing in Washington State. According to Elliot Mainzer, a policy manager with Bonneville Power Administration, "There are natural complementary patterns between wind and solar." The project combines a 230 MW wind farm with a 450 kW solar farm because "There's no getting around it, solar is more expensive -- just as wind was 25 years ago." They would have liked to have the solar panels the same size as the wind farm.


 * Note the nearly three decimal orders of magnitude difference between the power levels of the solar farm and the wind farm - which one is making the money? Do you see why it's not relevant? BPA is obviously doing that as a demoor for PR - looks like it's working. It's like saying my backup income plan for being laid off is cashing in the returnable bottles. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

There are thousands, perhaps millions in the United States who rely on collecting bottles and cans for a living. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 17:27, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Here is another quote, this one from 2004: "Hybrid systems show how wind and solar complement each other in a big way," Lorenzo Roybal, a master research technician with PV International Programs, said. "Either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so there is always something producing power." 199.125.109.73 (talk) 06:05, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The complementarity is of no commercial use - no-one installs enough solar to replace wind on calm days and I have yet to see a reference from the power industry considering this. It's all geodesic-dome hippy stuff, not real world. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Prices are rapidly decreasing for solar power. They are already low enough for investors to be willing to install them for free in return for a long term power purchase agreement. That practice started early last year. Long term you might be able to say that wind will always be cheaper than solar, but I doubt it, solar has a lot less maintenance than wind, and is 100 times more available than wind. Wind now accounts for over 1% of worldwide electricity, but solar is not far behind, and is increasing at a faster rate than wind. Solar is currently the fastest growing energy technology. Complementary systems, also sometimes called hybrid systems, are seen from Maine to Alaska. About the only location in the United States where they don't work are in the sunny states around Florida, which are currently rated by the AWEA as having 0 potential for wind power. I guess that hurricanes don't count. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 17:23, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Please do not remove this with no discussion. 199.125.109.49 (talk) 05:46, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
 * See discussion above. The complementarity effect, if any, is completely useless - and what if, perish forbid, the wind isn't blowing *at night*? Please don't re-add this without discussion! Have you not noticed that *no one on the good green Earth or major planets* is building wind farms with solar panels? The toy demo project is irrelevant to commercial wind power operations. A 450 kW solar panel in the context of a 230 megawatt wind project is irrelevant, it doesn't do anything to firm up the energy supplied by the wind farm, and is strictly there for public relations purposes.
 * My concern is that the unwary Wikipedia user (let us share a moment of silent reflection on the perils of someone relying on the Wikipedia for information) is somehow going to think that solar power is a relevant point in the installation of wind projects - when it's not. Or is this a "facts are optional, I'm riding my hobbyhorse to death and you can't stop me", kind of encyclopedia? Your response, Mr. 199.125.109.49, if that *is* your real name? --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:55, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Calm down. I have provided ample references of the complementary nature of sun and wind, and of the commercial application thereof. It could just as easily be argued that wind has no commercial application at all, because it only supplies 1% of electricity, other than of course a few isolated locations, like Denmark, where it also isn't very important because it only supplies less than 20% of electricity. This article for the umpteenth time is not restricted to applicability for one location or application, it is about all applications of wind power, and the complementary nature of wind and sun has been instrumentally applied in many locations, and needs to be mentioned. Quit being so foolish. What has been happening in this dialog is that you keep losing the argument, and run out of things to say and then go and change the article anyway. Please stop. You started out seeming quite intelligent until you insisted on odd spellings like complemtarity, benificial and negligable. Not that sicinttists have to have good spelling, and your other edits in other articles also tend to include misspellings, but when you put it back after it was pointed out that it was misspelled you really lost a lot of credibility. The sample data changes each day of course, but the period 2/3 to 2/9 was miserable for wind and not good for sun either other than on the 3rd and on the 9th. Yesterday and today wind and sun flipped - today had a lot of wind and no sun and yesterday was sunny with no wind. 199.125.109.49 (talk) 23:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
 * On the 14th it flipped again, with no wind and lots of sun. Another period this flipping occurred was from 1/26 to 2/1, a seven day period, except that the 27th and the 28th both had wind and little sun. 199.125.109.98 (talk) 14:28, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

(undent) As mentioned above, one straightforward way to reduce the impact of intermittency is to build bigger grids, for example: Supergrid to Supply Europe with Wind Power. Wind farms west of the Rockies could link up with solar power tower plants in the Mojave desert. Also notice that solar power towers that use liquid sodium as the heat transfer fluid can store enough heat to continue generating electricity for some time after sundown. With widely separated wind and solar generators in different climate zones, the overall variability would be much less. Europeans are thinking about building an undersea HVDC cable to link up the European grid with Iceland which has untapped hydro and geothermal. If it's practical to light London from Iceland, it's practical to link up lots of widely separated intermittent generators. And of course Moore's law continues to churn along, potentially reducing the cost of energy demand management. Someday maybe most electricity-consuming machines will react to the spot price of power, and adjust their power consumption as necessary to minimize their operating expense. As computing costs continue to fall, power consumers can get smarter. Electric water heaters, irrigation pumps, and so on have some potential to follow the maximum availability of wind. --Teratornis (talk) 07:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * There is definitely no need to go into details about solar in this wind power article, but the importance of interconnecting grids is briefly mentioned in the Penetration section. The wording could be improved - "interconnection to a large grid area export of electricity when needed" gets the idea across, and later Denmark is mentioned "The Danish grid is heavily interconnected to the European electrical grid, and it has solved grid management problems by exporting almost half of its wind power to Norway. The correlation between electricity export and wind power production is very strong." The concept of interconnecting continents to smooth out demand should be mentioned, as well as the need for importing as well as exporting power, unless storage is used. If you see the above discussion of a combined power plant, you will see that storage is probably more important than interconnecting continents. It's a trade off between bring up technology like interconnecting continents that doesn't exist and technology like local grids and storage that does exist. Wikipedia is not intended to try to predict the future. 199.125.109.56 (talk) 17:37, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Canopy alternative to blades
I am new to wiki, but old to energy studies. Why was my reference to a canopy based system removed without discussion? I cited pro bono, public domain work at www.gewp.org suggesting that the apex exit of a parachute is bird friendly.Nukeh (talk) 01:15, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Someone just answered and told me why: I should not be referencing my own websites. I agree, therefore the reference should be removed. Unfortunately, only about 10% of my work can be accessed by abstracts freely available to the public (e.g., PubMed). None has free public access to the actual papers because of the copyright of publisher. (There have to be many people in this boat.) My approach to this problem was to republish work on websites under fair-use copyright law and then re-reference it elsewhere so at least the fundamental aspects of the work is freely accessible to the public. The public did pay for the work through taxes via government grants to fund the work. Nukeh (talk) 11:11, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I hope that you understand that there is nothing wrong with self-promotion - in the right place - Wikipedia, however is not the right place. It is very hard to maintain neutrality if you are tooting your own horn. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 19:27, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, now I fully understand. Thanks for considering I am new to wiki, but old to academic reviews for grants and publications on paper media. The days of calling Maddox at Nature, Cech at Science, and sending NAS papers to buddies are over. I love wiki, and I want to do good work for wiki. Nukeh (talk) 19:42, 9 February 2008 (UTC)


 * You are allowed to link to your own website, as long as the link is relevant to the article and you're doing so in a neutral manner. Since 99% of people linking to their own website are doing it for non-neutral, promotional reasons, it's highly frowned upon, but it's not outright prohibited.  It's just better to discuss it on the talk page and let other editors add it to the article if they think it fits. — Omegatron 09:54, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Also note: the name of this wiki is Wikipedia (specifically, the English Wikipedia). Since there thousands of wikis, calling this site "wiki" is like referring to a specific wind farm as "wind farm". Check out the Editor's index for the 2000 or so instruction pages that will tell you how to do everything here. --Teratornis (talk) 06:11, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Radar interference
I can understand a shadow effect of not being able to see as well through a wind farm, but someone apparently hasn't noticed that radar travels at the speed of light, and so the turbine is going to appear to be motionless to the radar. As to not being able to detect aircraft at any height above the wind farm, regardless of the turbine height, well that is just balderdash. Like as if the wind farm was going to interfere with the radar image of the space shuttle for example. If a reference is clearly absurd is there any reason to include it? Here is one of the comments to the article:
 * Dear oh dear! Have any of you considered that this "radar interference" information is simply UNTRUE? This is exactly the modus of misinformation that has been going for decades in the USA, once money is passed from hand to hand under the table from an influential party that would be financially threatened by a change, to a party (such as a military branch) that cannot be argued with as easily. It is the media's responsibility to probe and to DEMAND to examine the details of exactly how this hole in radar coverage is purported to be accomplished. You will soon begin to see that the only "hole" is in the truth here, and in doing so, you will also be able to establish who you can trust in future and, more importantly, who is pushing this egregious issue for their own benefit at the cost of the British public! Don't accept nonsense like this without questioning the sources!

199.125.109.89 (talk) 06:11, 1 March 2008 (UTC) also wind energy can be produced if there is alot of wind and the wind mill can make faster energy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.4.129 (talk) 03:34, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

How does content from Wave, Wind, Hydro ...
... make it into Alternative Energy? Are WP editors working in more than one article at once? Isn't this redundant and time consuming?100TWdoug (talk) 00:33, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually collectively WP editors are working on many thousands of articles at once. Alternative energy is a slightly different subject than for example renewable energy. Many editors individually work on hundreds of articles. Many work on one and never show up again. Alternative energy is a term that was more common thirty years ago. Today renewable energy is a more common term, and has become very mainstream, with more new investment in renewable energy than in other types of energy. There is little point in expanding the alternative energy article, and little point in combining it with any other article. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 04:24, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Impact on Global Weather Patterns
This sounds like a bit of a stupid question, but presumably if we start using a lot of wind energy, then we are slowing down the movement and circulation of air in the atmosphere. How are we able to determine what the long term impact of this is? Recall that people expressing concerns about polluting the air and causing climate change were ridiculed when first proposed. How do we know that broad-based use of wind-based power generation won't have dire long-term consequences? (Those consequences to seem like they would be rapidly reversible, however.)

Presumably a similar argument could be made about geothermal exhausting the heat within the Earth, causing the tectonic action to cease, but that seems a lot further off than wind-based power generation having an impact.

194.59.184.12 (talk) 12:49, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Given that turbines are only from 25-80m high and the wind flows happen to levels considerably higher (understatement), any effect should be a rounding error. Also note spacing between turbines is pretty significant. And of course, any conversion into electricity will later be released as energy (heat), so contributing again to flows of air.--Gregalton (talk) 14:00, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Also I fail to see any consequence as a result of capturing energy instead of bending birches with it. 199.125.109.56 (talk) 17:40, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * In particular, consider the massive deforestations that have occurred throughout the world. In pre-Columbian North America, forests were nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. Settlers from Europe felled vast areas of forest to make room for agriculture, reducing the ground friction and speeding the flow of winds. Putting up wind turbines might increase wind drag to something closer to the original value. Most likely, whatever impact wind turbines could have on the weather will be less than the impact of generating the equivalent energy with fossil fuels, assuming fossil fuels will be available. It's conceivable, however, that if wind power gets near to reaching its theoretical potential, especially with airborne wind turbines, there might be some noticeable effects on weather patterns. --Teratornis (talk) 08:36, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The only effect would be from a reduction in global warming. You are barking up the wrong tree. 199.125.109.73 (talk) 01:16, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Mountain ranges affect the weather around them, by getting in the way of winds, and sucking kinetic energy out of them. If wind turbines were to become numerous enough in a given area, they might amount to something like a small mountain range, particularly as wind turbines keep getting individually larger. I doubt we will see wind power on such a scale for decades. Mountain ranges do not threaten the global climate - the Earth has managed quite well with a lot of mountains for a long time, so I wouldn't expect the weather impacts to be globally harmful. Cities already affect the weather around them (Urban heat island). But if wind power reached a prodigious scale, with millions of high-altitude airborne wind turbines sucking power out of the Jet streams, then there might eventually be some impact on global weather patterns. This isn't even worth worrying about, though, compared to Global warming and Peak oil, respectively the near-term and very near-term threats. --Teratornis (talk) 06:38, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Here is an article that talks about wind farms affecting local weather. This is nothing like An Inconvenient Truth, of course. --Teratornis (talk) 07:15, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The two most recent articles on that page are much more interesting than that one from 2 1/2 years ago that just says that modern turbines have less effect than older ones. The first one, from November 2007, quotes the study that says that any ten interconnected wind farms can be counted to supply at least 33% base load. I don't think we have that in the article, but we should. I would propose adding the sentence in the Penetration section:


 * "A study published in November 2007 in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology concluded that any ten wind farms could be interconnected by the grid and relied on to supply from 33 to 47% of yearly-averaged wind power as reliable, baseload electric power, providing minimum wind condition standards were met."


 * The other, from October, deals with the same issue in Texas, but is just an announcement of a grant to study wind penetration. 199.125.109.98 (talk) 13:37, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

bat "enthusiasts"?
Surely bat conservationists or bat biologists? Cheers! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.26.89.151 (talk) 10:07, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Updated wind data
I updated the wind power capacity list with info from the EWEA and other associations around the world. Why does this keep getting deleted? It is accurate information and the current list is inaccurate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.138.192.231 (talk) 21:21, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Maybe because you didn't indicate a reference? How is anyone to know that you weren't just fiddling with the numbers? 199.125.109.38 (talk) 21:41, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

The references (EWEA, GWEC) are listed for the current numbers so they are not new references. I am updating from current sources:

http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/mailing/windmap-08g.pdf

http://www.gwec.net/uploads/media/gwec-table-2008.pdf

http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=30&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=139&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=4&cHash=6691aa654e —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.138.192.231 (talk) 03:34, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Just check the updated current references!

Here's another source:

http://home.wxs.nl/~windsh/stats.html

I also check individual national wind associations, such as:

http://www.canwea.ca/images/uploads/File/fiche_a_29_janv_08.pdf

At the top of the wind power capacity table it lists notes [30] and [31]. Those are the old EWEA and GWEC tables/maps.. I could not figure out how to put in the updated references in their place (the first two links above). When I click edit it shows nothing there for the reference list. If you know how to do it, please do so. Those two sources should be adequate. If anyone feels it necessary, we could also put in a note to "See national wind association sites." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alan 69.138.192.231 (talk) 16:59, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * The body of the reference is in-line with the text; when the page is rendered by the browser, the in-line reference is shown in the references section at the tag. Look at the other citations in the text and you'll see how it works. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:46, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

The opening paragraph needs to be updated as well. There are now more than 94.1 GW of grid connected wind power.

69.138.192.231 (talk) 08:41, 7 February 2008 (UTC)Alan
 * Great! You've done the hard part, the researching of sources - and you've even typed in the URLs here.  Now could you just stick them in the article at the appropriate places like this  http://goodreference.com Elbonian Wind Power Association Web site, retrieved February 7,2008 . --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:22, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Just reverted several edits - one by User:Sgitheanach and a few by an anon with no edit summary. The edits had resulted in a broken image and broken ref links. Then I noticed this discussion - please be more careful with edits and us an edit summary (ip edits w/ no summary are immediately suspect). Vsmith (talk) 12:20, 7 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I suggest as a new external link:
 * World wind power as charts GWEC 6.2.2008 Watti Renew (talk) 13:53, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Capacity is not the same as power generated. Capacity is the total that could be generated if the wind were blowing 100% 24/7. Real power output from wind farms is like 20% of rated capacity. Please be careful when combining information from multiple sources to reach a conclusion. — Omegatron 23:47, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, in the electric power industry, "capacity" is the sum total of generator nameplate ratings. This is a power rating. The annual energy production may be much less than total capacity running for a year but this is not unusual in the power business...combustion turbines running on expensive natural gas are used only for peaking power and so have very low capacity factors for fuelled units.  The difference with wind is that the capacity is not dispatchable - it runs when the wind blows, not when everyone is cooking supper. See the discussion above and don't get "energy" and "power" mixed up as the media so regularly does.  Even the most innumerate journalist should be able to grasp the difference between how much money he saves in the bank each year and how much he gets paid per hour. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:54, 13 March 2008 (UTC)


 * This has nothing to do with the difference between energy and power. This is about a turbine rated for 1 MW capacity only generating 0.25 MW on average.  When the ___ Wind Energy Association reports on total capacity, they're talking about total potential output power, not actual generated power.  You can't use this number to calculate the world percentage generated by wind. — Omegatron 23:23, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, exactly. Its not total potential output power, it's capacity - sum of generator nameplate ratings. A more meaningful number would be annual Twh produced, rather than total capacity. It's not clear to me that the 1% isn't energy production, not capacity.  Annual capacity factor varies quite a lot ...the St. Leon project in Manitoba was justfied on 35% annual capacity and lately has been doing closer to 40%. Naturally, high-capacity factor sites get developed first. --Wtshymanski (talk) 01:21, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * It's not clear to me, either, which is why it needs a reference. — Omegatron 09:56, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm...
 * 1999: 24.954 TWh for wind out of 14735.63 total worldwide electricity generation  = 0.17%
 * 2001: 1.4% of 2,968 TWh for wind = 41.5 TWh, out of 15580.65 TWh worldwide  = 0.26%
 * 2005: 105.629 TWh for wind out of 18262.72 total = 0.58%
 * 2006: 160 TWh for wind out of 19027.72 total = 0.84%

So "1%" is plausible. :) — Omegatron 03:36, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Check the press release pdf that I added as reference; they are claiming 200 TWH in 2007. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:52, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I saw. They don't provide a source and it didn't seem realistic compared to the other numbers I had found. — Omegatron 23:19, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I still can't find a list of actual world-wide generated electrical energy for wind, by year. Can anyone help? This would help to make original research estimations of safety and see if there's a trend. While we can't put that original research into the article itself, it would be good information to have. — Omegatron 16:56, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Worldwide average capacity factor per year vs installed capacity per year would provide the same information, and we have the latter. — Omegatron 17:05, 29 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't know if you've solved the issue here. Page 50 of this source gives both peak capacity and actual TWh for wind but it's for 2001. This will give you a capacity factor which should scale for the most part. At the very least it's a second check. I've looked for more recent info but no luck. Mrshaba (talk) 03:38, 22 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Looks like you two are way ahead of me. This source might help with info from 2005, 2006 and 2007 (estimated) listing capacity as 59, 74 and 95 GW. The 2006 production is listed in the endnotes as 155 TWh but I couldn't find the other years. RE2007 Mrshaba (talk) 23:30, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm really surprised that no one can find a single document that just lists values for every year. I can't either. Here is the table I was working on:

And here's total world electrical consumption from two different sources:

EIA International Energy Annual 2005 - World Total Net Electricity Consumption, 1980-2005

BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007

— Omegatron (talk) 03:47, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

If you haven't tried yet, add Gipe and xls to your searches. Paul Gipe is a wind guru and he's organized the feed-in tariff into spreadsheets which are the best out there. I've never communicated with him directly but I believe he's responsive to emails. The thing with information is that there good ways to organize it and bad ways... From what I've seen of Gipe's info he knows how to do it the good way. I think he might have this info organized exactly the way you want it... Cheers. Mrshaba (talk) 07:47, 25 May 2008 (UTC)


 * See page 9 for a table with values for 1996, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006. Mrshaba (talk) 00:42, 26 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I looked through Gipe's stuff but no luck. There's a note on the site directing people to BTM Consult but their reports are expensive. Here's a brand new report EWEA. It has cumulative installation data for 1990-2007 on pg 15 and TWh/year info in bar graph format unfortunately for 2000-2007 on pg 36. Mrshaba (talk) 22:57, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * See figure 1 for GW numbers 1990-2003. Martinot Mrshaba (talk) 18:32, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify the quality of this source, Eric Martinot is also the lead author of the RENEWABLES 2007 GLOBAL STATUS REPORT REN21 Mrshaba (talk) 18:42, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Wave Power becomes section in Wind Power?
Ocean waves are generated by wind. Wave could redirect here to Wind, and we could be more self-consistent and informative in the process of combining information and editors. Any support? I understand that such logic could eventually lead to all articles being under Big Bang, but one consolidation does not imply such a domino effect. There is some cross-fertilization, too, given that weather, wind, and wave modelling are interactive in theory, prediction, and explanation of high energy wind and wave locations.100TWdoug (talk) 19:04, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * No. 199.125.109.57 (talk) 19:42, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Could you give a reason? - I forgot to mention that.100TWdoug (talk) 19:54, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Also no. You might as well also put wave power under hydropower. The subjects are clearly distinct. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:40, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * "Ocean waves are generated by wind." No, it think Ocean waves are mostly an effect of tide--> the movement of the earth, the moon and the sun relative to each other. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.165.35.217 (talk) 20:26, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Fine - Issue closed as far as I am concerned with 2 no's. I withdraw the suggestion.

Biased POV
The article repeatedly treats CO2 as a pollutant. This is clear bias towards global warming theory. The term "greenhouse gas" is biased since it accepts greenhouse theories (for a good rejection of the theory see "Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics (Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics, July 2007). A wind power article should discuss wind power and not tie in global warming ideas.  Still, as much as I reject this CO2 science, it does seem fair to mention that wind power reduces CO2, although the usefulness of this is disputed.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.58.224.12 (talk) 19:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
 * My recollection is that a recent court order (by the Supreme Court) requires the U.S. EPA to treat CO2 as a pollutant. Wind power is extensively discussed around the world as part of the solution to global warming, so I see no reason to not mention global warming issues, as appropriate to this article. If you are one of the few people left on the planet that doesn't think that global warming exists, well, you are in the extreme minority. Go check out the Larsen B ice shelf. Wait, you can't, it melted. The Snows of Kilamanjaro? Those are mostly gone as well. 199.125.109.98 (talk) 21:53, 20 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Whether CO2 causes global warming aside, adherence to that theory has become dogmatic to the point of brainwashing in a large part of the West's population. There are plenty of well educated people that do not believe human emissions are significantly contributing to global warming, and saying the person above is in the "extreme minority" is naiive, narrow minded and band wagonish. 72.179.63.12 (talk) 01:47, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I see, so we are all wrong and you are the only one who knows the real truth? Well take it to the global warming article please and ask that it be changed immediately. I'll check back to see if this article needs to be changed as a result of your changes there. 199.125.109.38 (talk) 06:20, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
 * That reply was unfair. User 72.179.63.12 merely claimed that adherence has become dogmatic and that plenty of people disagreed. And that was a reasonable response to "if you are one of the few people left...." by User 199.125.109.98. That said, see my reply to the original post by 69.48.224.12. crt (talk) 15:19, 15 May 2008 (UTC)


 * No, you are right 199.125.109.38 because you go along with what the media and some scientists on TV have told you, despite almost certainly not having thoroughly looked at the data yourself. Is that what you want to hear?  I'm not saying human emissions don't cause global warming.  I'm saying I don't know that they do.  And while you may think you know, I am fairly sure you don't to what a scientist would consider a high degree of certainty.  That is why your smug and sneering response to the original post annoyed me.  72.179.63.12 (talk) 18:11, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I suggest user 72.179.63.12 finds out what NAS and AAAS are, and what their opinions are on GW. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.165.35.217 (talk) 20:23, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Saying that the term "greenhouse gas" is biased really stretches the definition of bias. The term has a well-defined and well-known meaning, and a reasonable theory or mechanism. It's certainly interesting that a recent physics article suggests that theory is flawed, but it hardly constitutes a bias not to take into account all possible views. For example, I'm quite enamored with Andrew Prentice's theory of the origin of the solar system. But I think it has about 12 adherents worldwide. Sure, he's made some great predictions, definitely worth someone pursuing. But I'd never claim an article on the history of the solar system was biased just because it took the accepted view to be, well, accepted. crt (talk) 15:19, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

New models & more effectivity to Windpower
Hello, I found intresting article about windpower and  and it came to my mind that mighby from this new technological steps should be mentions also? It seems that this technology will make revolution in know wind power industry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.140.250.192 (talk) 10:43, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

ERDROLA will invest $8,000 million in renewable energies in the U.S. in the period of 2008-2010
"IBERDROLA will invest $8,000 million in renewable energies in the U.S. in the period of 2008-2010. The President of IBERDROLA affirmed that the objective is to double the wind power capacity of the Company in this country, where it has invested $9,000 million and in which it hopes to reach a wind power quota of 15% in 2010."

from http://www.iberdrola.es/wcorp/corporativa/iberdrola?IDPAG=ENCOMUNICA&codCache=12112936829516927

and http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/05/19/iberdrola-wind-update-markets-equity-cx_ll_0519markets22.html?feed=rss_markets

Could an editor more familiar with this article than me edit this new initiative into the appropriate place in the article? Doug youvan (talk) 14:38, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * It's a press release. Why does it have to do with this article? Summarize if you like under Wind power in the United States but press releases don't belong in the general article on wind power. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:37, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * OK, I'll move over to Wind power in the United States, but it will be some time before there is anything more than a Forbes article citing an $8B investment in wind. Perhaps we can photograph the farm after it is built, as there's no point in confusing students - who might be reading this article - with future planning in alternative energy. Doug youvan (talk) 20:25, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't even know if its notable there; new wind farmannouncments come out every month or so, what's special about this one- is this even a wind farm? It says "renewable energies" which covers a lot of things besides wind. Maybe people in the wind business find this sort of thing notable, but as a more general reader I don't find it particularly useful information. In 1970 this would have been big news, but today it's just another wind farm. True, bigger than average - but there's no MW capacity data in the release. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:49, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * If I read the article correctly they are planning on installing 430 million euros worth of wind farm projects, doubling their investment, not doubling the U.S. wind capacity, but helping the U.S. achieve a wind power quota of 15% in 2010. Any specific projects can also be added to the List of wind farms article, if they are over 100 MW. 199.125.109.89 (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I think I read that wrong, they are buying 430 million euros worth of turbines from GE, their current investment is $9B and they are adding another $8B, doubling their investment in wind in the U.S. (what's billion dollars between friends?). 199.125.109.89 (talk) 22:02, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Here is another footnote about the company: 199.125.109.89 (talk) 22:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * "The company, which has consolidated its world leadership of the wind power industry*, currently boasts 4,681 MW of installed capacity in Spain and 3,483 MW** abroad. It plans to invest €8.6 billion in the 2008-2010 period to add another 2,000 MW of capacity each year, to reach a total of 13,600 MW. It now has more than 1,367 MW of new capacity under construction."

I feel that it is disingenuous to mention that some studies say that the cost of wind power is 1 cent per kWh when within the text of the document stating that the cost of leasing land to farmers could easily be 6 to 16 cents per kWh.

In the discussion on the “Capacity Factor” it states that a 1MW turbine would produce 3,066 MWh per year, and then it states in the “Land Use” section that farmers may get $2,000 ($0.065/kWh) to $5,000 ($0.163/kWh) annually for each turbine.

These values don’t even consider maintenance costs, and the substantial investments required to install a wind turbine.

To say that wind energy is free or even economical is naïve at best, and deceptive and manipulative at worst. The fact that the promotion of wind energy is a national priority among many world powers is an indication of the malleability of politicians, and the effectiveness of lobbyists. Kook blogger (talk) 04:01, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Your mathematics is flawed. Farmers getting $5,000 divided by (3066 x 1,000 kWh) = $0.0016/kWh. Perhaps you calculated how many cents/kWh but then forgot that it was cents and not dollars. 199.125.109.73 (talk) 17:46, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Great - find a reference, and put it into the article. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:33, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Canadian wind turbine picture
I'm pretty sure there used to be a picture of a wind turbine in Alberta here, and I wanted to include it in the Wind power in Canada article, but I can't find it now. Does anyone know where it is? TastyCakes (talk) 02:17, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * nm, found it TastyCakes (talk) 02:19, 14 July 2008 (UTC) Image:Magrath-Wind-Farm-Szmurlo.jpg

Removed merge tag
For six weeks we've had a merge suggested with wind power industry - I took it out, that article will surely grow and [wind power]] is already quite large. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:53, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Proposed new external link
As per request on "External links" section I suggest that we add the following link Gives an up-to-date situation of Wind Energy installation in the EU. SusanRummers (talk) 10:10, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Wind power capacity installed in the European Union

As per request on "External links" section I suggest that we add the following link: I found the briefing sheets helpful. Mercury543210 (talk) 15:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) Briefing Sheets
 * Looks more informative than some of the links we have listed at the moment. Splette :) How's my driving? 02:01, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I'll take that as an OK! Mercury543210 (talk) 22:03, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

"The adverse effect of wind on thermal plant increases as the wind energy penetration rises. Plant operates less efficiently and with increasing volatility." And they - DELETED
I've taken the above bit out of the Penetration paragraph as it deliberately distorts the message of the ESB report. It is well known that wind power is more expensive than fossil, but not greatly so. It is also well known that it has an adverse effect on existing plant operation but that does not undermine the arguments for it.

Please Fix
- Add in the number of deaths per terawatt generated from coal including the mining of coal used in power generation. This should dwarf the deaths in wind and hydro generation given the danger of mining coal.

- Follow up and put in the conclusion (i.e. a ruling or abandonment) for the court cases cited especially the one from 2004 since anyone can file a suit for any reason (even baseless suits). For example, an article on person X shouldn't mention frivolous suits brought against them that were dismissed since the intent of the suit is not to get a settlement but just to get free publicity by a political advocacy group. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.155.35.130 (talk) 22:06, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

- Under the Intermittency section, add parentheses to the denominator of this line: unit cost of around $3,000,000,000 x 100 / 4,000 x 1 exp9 = 0.075 cent / kWh, i.e. (4,000 x 1 exp9). As written, it is off by a mere 18 orders of magnitude. Also, one table under utilization has column headings of "Power", but the the units applied are evidently TWh (terra Watt-hours), thus "Power" should be "Energy".Tomligon (talk) 01:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Energy Storage
The intermitancy section states that storing wind power might add 25% to the cost of the electricity, this needs a source. Does that mean that all the electricity actually usable which comes from storage will cost 25% more whilst ignoring the loss? Or is this ignoring the installation cost and only accounting for the marginal cost? I don't see how a whole lifecycle storage system for wind power could result in only a 25% increase in the cost of power taken from that storage system, since that entails a 75% efficiency. Hydro stroage systems are about 20% efficient and lead acid batteries are much more expensive, not to mention very enironmentally unfriendly. Hvatum (talk) 22:21, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Did you look at the inline reference (that's what they're for)? Not storing wind energy, but offsetting the effect of intermittency - there's more than one way to skin a cat. I'd also think you'll find that a pumped storage scheme is a lot better than 20% efficient - think hard - why would anyone build anything like that if it was only 20% efficient? Having chunks of the ice shelf drop into the ocean is also environmentally unfriendly - it's a matter of degrees, isn't it? --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:15, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Wind energy is not considered intermittent - it's variable. There will always be some sort of output from a wind farm, most modern wind turbines are designed to run in winds lower than expected. The reality is that the majority of turbines are sited so that the likely-hood of a 75% drop in availability (i.e. wind) is negligible, a 100% drop is next to zero. Also, many thermal plants are actually intermittent sources of power since they are often either on or off. For more information see any of the national wind energy associations (BWEA, WWEA, NZWEA etc. they all have information on this http://www.whywind.org/pb/wp_a1b4e1bf/wp_a1b4e1bf.html). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.93.86.199 (talk) 09:28, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Comparing the intermittent nature of wind power with nuclear or gas is BS. A single wind generator is intermittent, just as any other generating source is. The point is that it might not be generating anything 10% of the time, and very little over 50% of the time (that's how it reaches a "best case" 38% nameplate capacity). If you take ALL wind energy, sure, it's variable, but then so is every other generation technology. So saying wind energy is variable while nuclear is intermittent makes no sense. 24.107.154.72 (talk) 14:00, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Wind Power is intermittent, the wind blows and then it stops. There is almost no net benefit to grid tied wind farm power output.  Every windmill that is erected and connected to the grid is a white elephant.  Do the math.  No independent environmental group backs grid tied wind power.  By the time grid tied wind power hits the politicians in the face that allowed it, the world will uncover the big business money driving land owners and corporations secretly hiding behind and funding "non-profit" environmental groups.  Wind power is an complete economic drag on our power system and until storage technology exists to capture that energy, wind power is nothing more than a sham.  The easiest way to understand the zero benefit of wind power is to think of it this way...imagine an island with a conventional power generation system like a dam producing 5 MW of power.  Along comes a company and they convince the island residents that they need 1 MW of wind power.  So now the system has a capacity of 6 MW.  What happen when the wind stops and the residents are consuming 6 MW of power?  Some of the residents will suffer blackouts, many will suffer brownouts.  The point of adding the wind mill to the grid is completely lost.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.251.96.221 (talk) 04:26, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * That problem is easy to solve. Assuming the dam impounds a sizable reservoir, just uprate the dam with more turbines. The dam can provide extra output while the wind stops, then shut some turbines when the wind is blowing, storing up water for the next drop in wind power. In any case, hydroelectric dams themselves may have intermittent output, because the flow rate of the river(s) that feed them may vary with the season. Many regions of the world have wet and dry seasons, and the reservoir may not be large enough to maintain full output during the dry season. Note the capacity factor numbers for the hydroelectric plants of several countries - all are much less than 100%, which is to say almost no hydroelectric power plants can run at close to their full output over a whole year. Hydro plants therefore are natural allies of wind farms, because they need other power sources on the grid to let them save up water. Another option is to manage the electricity demand, for example by pricing electricity according to its immediate availability. Some customers may then choose to schedule some of their electricity use to match the availability of electricity; computerized equipment can arrange this automatically, for applications such as water pumping that don't have to run at fixed times. Also watch, which shows how to supply 100% of load-following grid power from renewable energy sources. Every source of electric power presents its own set of strengths and weaknesses. A robust grid combines power from several different sources with different characteristics, allowing the strengths of one to compensate for the weaknesses of another. In any case, blackouts have occurred since the invention of electricity, and people just have to deal with them. A nasty one in Canada occurred during the North American ice storm of 1998 that knocked down transmission lines on part of the Canadian grid that delivered hydroelectric power, normally one of the most reliable sources of power. --Teratornis (talk) 06:32, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Throughout history, people routinely adjusted their daily routines to account for weather and the seasons. The temporary availability of cheap fossil fuels, especially petroleum which provides energy-dense liquid fuels, has caused some people to forget that most people throughout history and even today in many parts of the world have to take the weather and season into account. The expectation that human activity can forge along without regard to any external reality is a temporary aberration which the peaking and subsequent irreversible decline of fossil fuels may soon erase. Fortunately the great strength of people is our adaptability, and Moore's law keeps making us more adaptable. --Teratornis (talk) 06:49, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Wind power 2008
In previous years, editors have updated wind installed capacity during the year as data became available - I think we should add a 2008 column to the table and freeze the data or even restore to end-2007. Any opinions?--Gregalton (talk) 12:36, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I would recommend restoring to end of 2007 data. It is way too troublesome to update it month by month. There is no need for a 2008 column until the end of 2008 figures become available. In the article it is ok to note trends and indicate projections, but maintaining a table is too problematical. I think someone put in a 2008 column with only one number, and I took it out. Also the "Annual Wind Power Generation (TWh) / Total electricity consumption(TWh)" chart is too confusing, it needs to have the numbers put into separate columns. 199.125.109.49 (talk) 20:41, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

editprotected Please replace the "Annual Wind Power Generation" table with the following. 199.125.109.49 (talk) 02:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * This page is not fully protected, so admin help isn't needed to edit it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 21:20, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Several numbers in this new table strongly disagree with the old one, and most citations are broken, unreliable, or do not support the stated data. I propose this table be removed until someone is willing to put a good effort into it.--Yannick (talk) 13:27, 15 June 2008 (UTC) Either I misread something, or the serious errors got fixed. Citations are still broken, unreliable or do not support the data, but on second look the numbers seem plausible.--Yannick (talk) 19:22, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

The tables are all breaking frames, can anyone take a look at that please? - Team4Technologies (talk) 15:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

What really is driving Wind Power development?
Could it be the PTC that is going to "bust" the industry within a few years?

any comments? 97.88.136.94 (talk) 02:05, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but the only PTC I know about is the Power Takeoff Converter that gets attached to a tractor. Must be some other PTC that you had in mind. 199.125.109.38 (talk) 06:47, 14 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Assume you mean PCT as in Production Tax Credits? If so, I think you could be on to something, as there are continuing calls to extend the scheme further round the world. Now if it were taken away, that would be an interesting one.  Jrhilton (Jrhilton) 23:13, 26 June 2008 (UTC)


 * A May 12, 2008 editorial in the Wall St. Journal stated, "For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and 'clean coal' $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grundle2600 (talk • contribs) 23:23, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you have heard that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics? Each new technology can benefit from subsidy. The TVA, Grand Coulee Dam, Hoover Dam - were they built with subsidies? Yes. Coal's biggest "subsidy" is the health costs it incurs, which is not included in the highly biased opinion piece review of subsidies. Since solar is by far the biggest resource available, and wind can easily provide all our energy, it is highly beneficial to get them into mainstream use. If you average the amount of subsidy for each over the next 100 years the numbers will be reversed. And how about over the next 1,000 years? 199.125.109.98 (talk) 05:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The subsidy for petroleum in the United States also includes the cost of guarding the Middle East oilfields, part of the Carter Doctrine followed by every later U.S. President. That cost has escalated considerably in recent years with the war in Iraq. By some calculations, the real cost of motor gasoline in the U.S. is over $10/gallon, but instead gasoline receives a huge subsidy from general taxes. This causes U.S. gasoline consumption to be much higher than it would be if motorists had to pay for the cost of oil wars directly at the pump. Wind power does not directly substitute for motor gasoline yet, but may begin to do so in the near future on a large scale if initiatives such as the Pickens Plan or plug-in hybrids or battery electric vehicles succeed. Of course telecommuting is already a viable large-scale option for replacing gasoline for physical travel with electricity for virtual travel, and some of the electricity could come from wind power. The economic distortion caused by U.S. government policy to subsidize the real cost of guarding oil supplies is retarding the shift away from oil, which is already occurring anyway. --Teratornis (talk) 07:03, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

misleading and or wrong
From the Utilization Section: "Texas has become the largest wind energy producing state, surpassing California. In 2007...[57]"

As one of the members of the PG&E Team in the Altamont Pass (1988-89) and a former member of the WEPA, I noted the reference to this incorrect statement and found that the source cited said nothing about "producing" rather the material cited was in reference to installed capacity. To a non-energy oriented student doing homework for a high school assignment, such mis-leading statements should be carefully avoided. Texas has become the national leader in installed megawatts of wind energy; however actual production figures were not given in the footnote to support the statement.

Another correction:

"Even though Denmark has installed over 6000 wind turbines its requirements for spinning reserve power source mean it has been unable to shutdown any of its existing coal-fired power plants. [27]" - This implies that the "stupid or optimistic" Danes expected to be able to shut down these stations, where is the evidence that this was there expectation ?

"Another report from Denmark noted that their wind power network was without power for 54 days during 2002. "

This may be true but is irrelevant - wind power is largely seen as a fuel saver - wind power proponents accept that back up will be needed, which is not as expensive as is implied.

'[28] Due to these problems they have cancelled plans to develop any further turbines.[29]"

The above para is cetainly not true - the Danes are planning to increase the wind power elelmen yet further. Engineman 07:57, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I noticed that too. They are building a new 400MW offshore wind farm and are looking at larger, 8 to 12 MW 170 m turbines, with blades that reach to a height of 270 m. 199.125.109.89 (talk) 04:49, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link. I had been wondering how large wind turbines of the future would be getting. One limiting factor is the size of cranes that can lift the tower sections, nacelle, and rotor. For wind farms on land, it's also hard to move the enormous wind turbine components by truck. As to the Danes' problems with the intermittency of wind, they plan to work around that by building a big HVDC power transmission network from Morocco to Iceland to Russia that will link up wind farms, geothermal, hydro, and solar power stations across a wide area, which should smooth out lots of the intermittencies:
 * --Teratornis (talk) 08:37, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * --Teratornis (talk) 08:37, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

US Wind Field Map
Not to be US-centric, but shouldn't we have one of the maps for US wind field strength up in this article? The US uses a lot of energy, and it is has the military strength to obtain it via oil fields, so I hope my suggestion is viewed as peaceful and not centered in Kansas. Kansas is not the backwards place some people think (e.g., monkey trials), but rather our female governor has just nixed a few coal-fired plants. Now, if we can just get the rest of the world to follow suit into alternatives.

May I suggest an easy to read, large type, reduced information, clear and arousing figure that links to the same in Commons, but then has a link to a highly detailed map? MsTopeka (talk) 17:45, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Added map. If someone can find a wind map for Europe or anywhere else that would be nice to add as well. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 04:11, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Image:US wind power map.png is a little old. Newer maps are available that show finer resolution. Commercial wind turbines keep getting bigger, which means taller, and wind power class increases with height above ground in many areas. For example, compare these two wind power maps for Ohio at 50m and 100m height above ground, respectively:
 * 50m wind power map for Ohio
 * 100m wind power map for Ohio
 * Someone looking at Image:US wind power map.png might look at the large area of Ohio that the map shows as having only class 2 wind, and conclude these areas wouldn't be getting any commercial wind power development. However, the detailed maps show areas of class 4 and class 5 wind over much of Logan County, Ohio and Champaign County, Ohio, and a wind power developer is looking at building there in 2009:
 * Wikipedia has (or will eventually have) "Wind power in ..." articles for every country, state, province, etc. with significant wind power development. Thus we can put more detailed wind resource maps in articles such as Wind power in the United States and Wind power in Ohio. --Teratornis (talk) 08:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Good points; do you have a reference link for the US map you'd like to proffer? --Skyemoor (talk) 13:44, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I Googleed around a bit and found:
 * The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States dates from 1986. That appears to be the source of Image:US wind power map.png.
 * Wind Powering America: State and United States Wind Resource Maps from the EERE shows a more recent and detailed 50m wind resource map. Presumably it falls under PD-USGov as a U.S. government publication. I don't see a 100m map, which would better reflect the scope for commercial wind power development with today's larger wind turbines.
 * AWS Truewind sells commercial wind resource maps. They have a nice interactive wind resource mashup with Google Maps on their site, which lets you scroll around the U.S. and look at wind resource estimates for various heights, but I imagine their maps are under copyright. The 50m and 100m maps for Ohio that I linked to above do not clarify their copyright status. --Teratornis (talk) 03:35, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
 * AWS Truewind sells commercial wind resource maps. They have a nice interactive wind resource mashup with Google Maps on their site, which lets you scroll around the U.S. and look at wind resource estimates for various heights, but I imagine their maps are under copyright. The 50m and 100m maps for Ohio that I linked to above do not clarify their copyright status. --Teratornis (talk) 03:35, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Scalable Wind Power
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html

This looks interesting Chendy (talk) 14:14, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
 * We already have a footnote reference to the original research paper in :
 * Critics of wind power like to point out the extreme variability of power output from a single wind turbine. This would be very important to individuals who live off-grid and rely on the wind blowing over a single dwelling. For large power grids extending over multiple weather regimes, the wind is usually blowing (or if not, the Sun is often shining) somewhere. See also SuperGrid. --Teratornis (talk) 21:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Critics of wind power like to point out the extreme variability of power output from a single wind turbine. This would be very important to individuals who live off-grid and rely on the wind blowing over a single dwelling. For large power grids extending over multiple weather regimes, the wind is usually blowing (or if not, the Sun is often shining) somewhere. See also SuperGrid. --Teratornis (talk) 21:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Critics of wind power like to point out the extreme variability of power output from a single wind turbine. This would be very important to individuals who live off-grid and rely on the wind blowing over a single dwelling. For large power grids extending over multiple weather regimes, the wind is usually blowing (or if not, the Sun is often shining) somewhere. See also SuperGrid. --Teratornis (talk) 21:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Intermittency and transmission solution -- locate smelters where there is wind
The transmission problem can be addressed by using wind energy for smelting:


 * Aluminum smelters use huge amounts of electricity to get aluminum from ore (Bauxite). Smelting of aluminum is often done where there is cheap electricity. Up until now, Alcoa and other aluminum companies have located smelters where there is coal for electrical generation (e.g., near strip mines).  But smelters can just as easily be located where wind or solar energy are abundant.  By siting smelting at the wind power sources, transmission wires can be short.

The intermittency problem can also be addressed by using wind electricity for smelting:


 * The energy-intensive smelting process can go on 24 hours around the clock, whenever there is wind. Smelting can use wind energy when there is no demand for electricity to heat, cool, or light homes.  Enough wind power capacity could be built up and brought online to meet peak demand on many days, but instead of being wasted when it wasn't needed for homes, it could be used for smelting.  And when the homes needed all the energy, the smelting could take a recess.  Smelting on an intermittent schedule is well worth it if the electricity used is surplus wind energy and thus, in bulk, nearly free.
 * Have you read much about aluminum smelting? Check out Hall-Héroult process and contemplate the fact that aluminum companies place a very high premium on steady supplies of power; you can't start and stop a potline like you can the light in the front hall. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:31, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * When aluminum companies look for power sources, they prefer baseload power. The renewable energy sources which can provide baseload power include geothermal power, hydropower, ocean thermal energy conversion, and biomass. For example:
 * Wind-generated electricity could certainly smelt aluminum, just as it can drive any other process that uses electricity, but for continuous industrial production, other sources of electricity would have to fill in the gaps in wind. For example, hydroelectric plants partner well with wind farms, as they can reduce their output when the wind is blowing, saving up water for when the wind dies. Applications better suited to run exclusively or near-exclusively from wind would be those which have inherent energy storage, such as water pumping and sustainable ammonia production. See this report for details on the economics and feasibility of using wind power to generate ammonia:
 * A sustainable ammonia plant would generate hydrogen on-site using renewable electricity to electrolyze water. Storing hydrogen on-site would not be too difficult, and it would allow the plant to buffer the variability of renewable electricity supply, to drive the Haber process continuously to produce ammonia. Alternatively, the plant could store the ammonia product, when production rate exceeds shipping capacity. Ammonia is easier to store than hydrogen, and starting and stopping the Haber process to follow wind availability may not be as expensive as starting and stopping aluminum potlines. But note: on Wikipedia we do not do original research, so this is not the place to brainstorm about how to mitigate the intermittecy of wind. Instead you should search for solutions other people have proposed or implemented, and cite reliable sources for them. Fortunately, lots of smart people have written a lot about energy, and you can be sure lots of people have thought about coping with the intermittency of wind. It's hard to think of many bright ideas in this field that haven't already been thought of. And sign your talk page comments. --Teratornis (talk) 20:37, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * In general the article does a pretty good job of dealing with intermittency, but more details are covered in the intermittent power sources article. I don't mind adding smeltering, but it isn't a solution to what to do when there is no wind, just a solution to what to do when there is too much wind. However, the physical location of the smeltering is less important, as we already know that we need to build an HVDC energy backbone in the Americas and in Eurasia/Africa, making the physical location pretty much moot. Delphi234 (talk) 15:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * A SuperGrid will have finite transmission capacity, so there will still be some incentive to locate large captive power users near to power sources. Actually, it becomes an optimization problem, as there are also transport costs for raw materials, finished products, and workers. Shipping electricity long distances may be cheaper than shipping other things, assuming adequate transmission capacity on the grid. --Teratornis (talk) 06:05, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * "A SuperGrid will have finite transmission capacity," (er no - you just build it big enough???) Engineman (talk) 14:38, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Changing the size of the grid is primarily an option before it gets built. Once the transmission lines are up, they are difficult to retrofit, just as it is difficult to increase the size of an oil pipeline or the number of lanes on a highway. The idea behind the SuperGrid is to shift electricity around as needed to solve intermittency problems. If there is a large captive user of power, positioning it far from its usual supplies of power consumes grid bandwidth that would be desirable to leave open for intermittent power shifts. That is analogous to building a multi-lane highway with some of the lanes permanently taken by a captive user which will never share those lanes with other users. Thus the captive user of power must pay for the full costs of transmission line bandwidth it uses all the time. That cost increases with distance, which creates an optimization problem. --Teratornis (talk) 19:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * "A SuperGrid will have finite transmission capacity," (er no - you just build it big enough???) Engineman (talk) 14:38, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Changing the size of the grid is primarily an option before it gets built. Once the transmission lines are up, they are difficult to retrofit, just as it is difficult to increase the size of an oil pipeline or the number of lanes on a highway. The idea behind the SuperGrid is to shift electricity around as needed to solve intermittency problems. If there is a large captive user of power, positioning it far from its usual supplies of power consumes grid bandwidth that would be desirable to leave open for intermittent power shifts. That is analogous to building a multi-lane highway with some of the lanes permanently taken by a captive user which will never share those lanes with other users. Thus the captive user of power must pay for the full costs of transmission line bandwidth it uses all the time. That cost increases with distance, which creates an optimization problem. --Teratornis (talk) 19:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

It is a well known fact that using alternative energy for heating is not a good idea. Heating takes enormous amounts of power better delivered by other means so I don't know how the public ends up thinking smelting is a good idea. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.251.96.221 (talk) 14:21, 24 October 2008 (UTC)


 * It is a well known fact  This phrase is usually used when someone wants to voice the POV without support of any kind. There are many examples of heat being supplied by solar technologies (passive solar, solar hot water, solar steam process heat, etc), so the opinion above does not provide us with anything from reliable sources that can improve the article. --Skyemoor (talk) 16:26, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Not to mention geothermal energy which supplies heat as its primary form, and supplies it around the clock, which is desirable for continuous industrial processes. The user probably meant "renewable electricity" but garbled it into "alternative energy". Electricity tends to be a poor source of medium-temperature process heat in large volumes, but can be an effective way to supply high-temperature heat in electric furnaces. For many processes that run on heat, there are alternative processes that run on electricity. In general, industry selects whatever process it sees to be the cheapest, in terms of its direct costs, and any external costs a government prevents it from dumping on someone else. --Teratornis (talk) 19:27, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * The phrase: It is a well known fact is an example of what we call weasel words on Wikipedia (no offense to weasels). "Is ... known" is a verb in the passive voice with missing actor, which raises the question "By whom?" without answering it. On Wikipedia we should always specify who knows something or performs an action. --Teratornis (talk) 20:14, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Inga Dam-Shaba HVDC link
The Inga Dam shiops power 100o km to the Shaba copper mine.....approx....there are costed plans to ship power all the way from the dam, on the southern tip of Africa to Europe. Engineman (talk) 08:09, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I edited your comment slightly to make it do what I think you intended: become a separate section. You seem to be referring to these articles:
 * Inga Dam
 * Inga-Shaba
 * High-voltage direct current, whose lead section says:
 * The longest HVDC link in the world is currently the Inga-Shaba 1700 km (1056 mile) 600 MW link connecting the Inga Dam to the Shaba copper mine, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
 * While not directly about wind power, this is similar to the long HVDC interties necessary to move wind-generated electricity from sparsely-populated rural areas like the Great Plains region of the United States to population centers in neighboring states. --Teratornis (talk) 22:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Terratornis - yes many thanks for correcting my sloppy writing ...Engineman (talk) 00:57, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Environmental effects
"The initial carbon dioxide emissions "pay back" is within about 9 months of operation for off shore turbines.[86]" I don't think this sentence is supportable. There is one reference which refers to data given by one company for their turbines - hardly an unbiased source. Also, what about onshore turbines? Richerman (talk) 22:55, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
 * So which studies did you read that gave other numbers for CO2 payback? Put the references in the article! --Wtshymanski (talk) 23:07, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I didn't say that I had, but I shall look around and see what I can find. This is a controversial subject and Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, so I would suggest that the sentence should say something like "One company has claimed that the pay back for their off shore turbines is within about nine months of operation." Richerman (talk) 23:21, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
 * This article in a refereed journal gives an energy payback time of a modern 5 MW wind turbine for offshore use of only 4 months. However, I am not sure that the errection of the turbine is included. I don't have access to the full article unfortunately. Splette :) How's my driving? 02:06, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Further, this PhD thesis from 2007 found an energy payback time of 0.39 years for an offshore wind park in Denmark. Splette :) How's my driving? 02:12, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I've changed the wording a little and added some more references. The report to the UK House of Lords is interesting as it includes decommissioning and works out at 1.1 years. Richerman (talk) 10:21, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Note that in addition to energy payback and CO2 payback there is a third issue of liquid fuels payback. At the moment, wind power generates electricity, whereas the trucks, trains, and ships that haul wind turbines, and the cranes that erect them on site, consume energy in the form of diesel fuel which comes almost entirely from petroleum. (Biodiesel offers the possibility of powering heavy mobile equipment in a more renewable way, but biodiesel will probably only be available in small quantities unless and until algae fuel technology advances substantially.) Thus wind power, at present, consumes a type of fossil fuel that it cannot yet pay back. Given that petroleum comes with supply risk (peak oil) and political risk (energy security), it would be nice to close the energy loop with wind turbines, so to speak, and come up with ways to supply more if not all of the energy to build wind turbines from wind turbines, or from sustainable biofuels. Currently we are not there yet: wind power by itself cannot build more wind power, and since we know petroleum is finite and unsustainable, wind power which depends on petroleum for its construction is also (at the moment) unsustainable. This is not an argument against wind power, of course, but if we can figure out how to build wind power using only wind power and other renewable sources such as biofuels, then the energy payback discussion could become much more direct. One might discover, for example, that to build a large wind turbine, one needs to run another wind turbine of the same size for one year. At the moment, almost every source of energy (including coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, and geothermal) depends on petroleum for liquid fuels it cannot yet repay. Thus (at the moment) one should not view these alternative energy sources as petroleum replacements, but rather as petroleum extenders or multipliers. If a wind turbine has an EROEI of 35, that's a pretty good petroleum multiplier, but wind power must eventually get completely away from reliance on petroleum or else wind power will stop shortly after petroleum does. Here is an interesting paper which discusses some ways to move toward that goal:
 * including making renewable ammonia from wind-driven electrolysis of water (as Norsk Hydro did at its Vemork plant with hydroelectricity from 1911 to 1971), and using the reverse water gas shift reaction to create additional hydrocarbon fuels from wind-generated hydrogen combined with CO2 emissions from fermentation plants and wastewater treatment plants. --Teratornis (talk) 09:19, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * including making renewable ammonia from wind-driven electrolysis of water (as Norsk Hydro did at its Vemork plant with hydroelectricity from 1911 to 1971), and using the reverse water gas shift reaction to create additional hydrocarbon fuels from wind-generated hydrogen combined with CO2 emissions from fermentation plants and wastewater treatment plants. --Teratornis (talk) 09:19, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

How wind farms work
One thing that seems to be missing from this article is a good explanation of how wind in converted into electricity. I think the design of a wind farm would probably make a good article in itself with a short section in this article pointing to the main article. There is an excellent collection of usable photographs www.geograph.org.uk here which shows all the stages of the construction of Scout Moor Wind Farm, with pictures of all of the components used, which would illustrate the article well. Richerman (talk) 13:04, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * A wind farm is just a collection of wind turbines - just what sort of explanation is appropriate? Do we need to descend to explaining blades and shafts and gears and wires whizzing through a magnetic field, or can we refer the curious reader to electrical generator and other such articles? Does anyone over the age of 9 need that explanation here? This could bulk up the article immensely and not convey much wind-farm-specific information at all. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:46, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, forget what I said about a seperate article as I found the link to wind turbine after I posted this and it gives a lot of the information but some of it is quite technical and it doesn't actually say that much about what happens to the power that's produced. The main article wind farm does give more of what I was thinking of, so I think a few more lines in the section that's presently headed "Turbine placement" about how the electricity gets from the turbines to the national grid, would do it - although the heading would need to be changed. Richerman (talk) 17:21, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * See the links in the Electricity generation navigation template. They link to articles that describe how electricity grids operate. Some of those grid-related links are in the Wind power template which is already at the bottom of . These navigation templates function as a comprehensive introduction to a subject, by linking to a set of articles that describe many aspects of it, and how it fits with related subjects. In other words, to understand wind power in depth, you would need to read all the articles linked from Wind power. We make navigation templates so we don't have to repeat all the background information for a topic in every article related to the topic. One can, of course, find most of the same links scattered throughout the prose of an article. A navigation template collects them into one unified chunk, in case someone wanted to really get to know a subject by reading all of them. It might take a person several weeks to read all the wind power articles and have them sink in, because we have a lot of material on the subject. --Teratornis (talk) 17:55, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes it would take a long time to read them all - that's exactly my point. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be accessable to the layman, so I was interested in improving this one by adding a couple of lines of explanation to make it more accessible. Anyone who wanted to go into the subject further could then follow the links. However, I can see I'm flogging a dead horse, so I've lost interest now. Richerman (talk) 22:48, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * See Summary style. If you can find a way to work in a few explanatory sentences that summarize some related article, feel free. Wikipedia is supposed to be accessible to the layman, but that refers to reading Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia, and having one's edits stick, is more difficult. Before making major additions or changes to an article, one should first read all the related articles to get the lay of the land first. That's not an argument against making changes, it's advice about how to make changes the smart way. Yes, it is a lot of work to learn enough about a subject and Wikipedia's coverage of it to be able to edit with a high chance of success here. The best articles are by people who have spent a lot of time studying Wikipedia. Nobody seems to know a shortcut method. By the way, I like the Scout Moor Wind Farm gallery you linked to above. We have some photo galleries on Commons, such as Wind farm and Wind turbine. You could make an account on Commons and add to those galleries, perhaps with a wind farm construction section or page somewhere. This is all a volunteer project, so nothing happens unless someone does it. Lately I've been working on a section Unconventional wind turbines which I might spin into its own article at some point, since there seems to be some wind turbine tourism springing up unexpectedly in various places around the world. It would be fun to feature some educational exhibits that exist at various wind farms, explaining how they work. --Teratornis (talk) 02:07, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I should add, on a positive angle, that when one reads through all the related articles on a subject, one will likely see many ways to improve some of the articles, because some people who worked on some articles were not aware of all the related articles at the time. Either this was because some of them were casual editors who had not read all the related articles, or because some of the related articles were less complete or even nonexistent at the time. Wikipedia can benefit from editors who read lots of related articles and then see ways to improve articles in light of other articles that already exist. See Build the web. My goal is to read every article on Wikipedia about the topic of energy, but since there are so many and they keep changing, that might not be a goal one could ever truly reach. --Teratornis (talk) 02:51, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Well ,originally I thought someone who knew more about the subject would be better placed to make the addition but maybe I should have just been bold and had a go at it myself in the first place - I did actually write most of the Scout Moor Wind Farm article. Sometimes knowing a bit less about the subject makes it easier to make it more accessible to the others who are in a similar position. When I have some time I'll try adding something in, and if you don't like it you can always revert it :) Richerman (talk) 09:53, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

OK I've added that in now, but could someone please clarify the second paragraph under grid management system as it's pretty incomprehensible to the layman. For instance:
 * "Induction generators, often used for wind power projects, require reactive power for excitation" I've wikilinked "excitation" but couldn't this sentence be made clearer?
 * "Different types of wind turbine generators behave differently during transmission grid disturbances" What's a transmission grid disturbance - does this just mean a fault on the transmission grid, if so what sort of faults occur?
 * "induction generators cannot support the system voltage during faults" what does that mean?
 * "properly matched power factor correction capacitors along with electronic control of resonance can support induction generation without grid" what is resonance, and does this sentence mean that when there is nowhere to feed the electricity to the capacitors will deal with it?

I find the rest of the article quite comprehensible but this section is just too technical. Richerman (talk) 00:49, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The first step in clarifying something on Wikipedia is to link all the jargon terms. At least then the reader might eventually get some understanding by drilling down through all the jargon definitions. AC power is pretty confusing, however, to anyone who hasn't taken at least an introductory course in Electrical engineering. I'm not sure how clear that section could become to someone who hasn't. I added a link to Induction generator. While I was there, I added the Electricity generation template to some of the jargon articles, and added links to the template. If you have questions about specific passages in an article, and you can't figure them out by the usual tricks of Googling and reading all the references and linked-to articles, you can ask the original author for clarification. You can find the original author by checking the history or using a tool like Wikiblame. It would be nice if everything on Wikipedia could be a masterpiece of clarity, but few articles start out that way. A sentence like "Different types of wind turbine generators behave differently during transmission grid disturbances" surely won't cut it in a featured article (it borders on weasel wording), so if you can figure out how to answer the questions you identified as following directly from the vague sentence, that would help a lot. One approach is to Google or Google wikipedia for phrases such as "transmission grid disturbances". The confusing paragraph does cite two sources, but does not link to online versions of the cited articles. I'm guessing the cited articles may explain the material in more detail, not that they would necessarily be understandable to non-engineers. If nothing else, we can be pretty confident that someone out there must know how to hook wind farms up to power grids, because there are lots of wind farms on power grids, so all this material must be written down somewhere, perhaps in an accessible format. --Teratornis (talk) 23:45, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I added more links on jargon terms, perhaps making the passage almost understandable. (I said "almost".) I looked up proper citations for the two references with Google scholar cite:
 * Making Connections: Wind Generation Challenges and Progress
 * Wind Plant Integration
 * Now at least the citations have links to the article abstracts. Only IEEE subscribers can view the articles online, and I'm not one. --Teratornis (talk) 00:34, 9 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that - as you say it's "almost" understandable now. However, I've now had to edit the page on Low voltage ride through that you linked to - is there no end to this editing (sigh!!). And that one has the phrase "defined as the reactive current of the positive sequence of the fundamental" - ?? I have a mission to make as many articles in wikipedia as understandable as possible which, as you say, more often than not means looking up things yourself and taking a stab at rewording them. However it's usually best to try and get the people who understand the subject to do it first :) Richerman (talk) 01:09, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * There is an end to Wikipedia editing - when every article is a featured article, and all notable topics have articles. And, I suppose, nothing new occurs in the outside world for us to write about. WP:FA says:
 * At present, there are 2,300 featured articles, of a total of 2,616,426 pages on the English Wikipedia. Thus, about one in 1,130 articles is listed here.
 * That means we have a considerable distance to go. We are also getting farther behind each day, as the number of articles increases much faster than the number of featured articles. Only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's users have read and understood enough of the friendly manuals to contribute featured-quality edits. I suspect that to really get a handle on the quality problem, Wikipedia will need much better editing tools. For example, currently the procedures for creating footnotes (in WP:FOOT, WP:CITE, and WP:CITET) are so tedious and bewildering that only a few users have mastered them. Plus there's the larger problem that most people aren't very good writers. We may need computers to pass the Turing test so they can "understand" what we are trying to write, and express it clearly for us - or, at least, the computer could identify all our ambiguities and pose questions to the human writer that would resolve them. This is how a skilled human writer collects information from other humans who don't communicate well, and cleans it up. Probably most of the energy articles on Wikipedia need work - most that I have looked at, anyway. See User:Teratornis/Energy for my notes about some of the articles I have worked on or thought about working on. You don't have to fix every problem on Wikipedia, but anything you can improve will help out. (Even just writing notes about the problems you see is better than ignoring them.) If enough people do that, eventually we could get there. I recommend trying to recruit people who have an interest in these subjects, but are currently wasting their energy by posting throwaway messages on discussion sites and so on. Online discussion fills a need, but it doesn't lead to an organized structure of knowledge like a wiki does. Posting on discussion sites is a lot easier than learning to build an encyclopedia, but if more people learn to do what we are doing here, collectively we can produce something of real value. Just adding links between articles helps a lot, because it brings more interested eyeballs to articles on obscure topics like Low voltage ride through that might otherwise languish. I would like every energy article to have some sort of navigation template, for example. That would reduce the tendency for these articles to get orphaned. --Teratornis (talk) 02:31, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The phrase: "defined as the reactive current of the positive sequence of the fundamental" might refer to Fourier analysis or Harmonic analysis. It won't make sense to someone who hasn't studied the applied mathematics of Power engineering. It might be nice to add a bibliography to some of these articles with a note: "If you wanted to understand this article, you would first read all these engineering textbooks". We don't have to explain everything, but we should try to link to the explanations. Ultimately it would be nice if a person could learn any career just by reading Wikipedia, but that point is far off. --Teratornis (talk) 02:42, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I searched with Google Books and found this textbook reference:
 * which looks suitable to cite for "the reactive current of the positive sequence of the fundamental". I'm adding it to Low voltage ride through. --Teratornis (talk) 03:13, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * which looks suitable to cite for "the reactive current of the positive sequence of the fundamental". I'm adding it to Low voltage ride through. --Teratornis (talk) 03:13, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Interested eyeballs? now there's a concept..... Actually the comment about editing was meant to be ironic :) I know I'm going to spend the rest of my life being a busybody on wikipedia and trying to improve things. I would like to pick you up on one point though - wikipedia is not a textbook and you shouldn't need any prior knowledge to understand an article. To quote from wp:what wikipedia is not: A Wikipedia article should not be presented on the assumption that the reader is well versed in the topic's field. Introductory language in the lead and initial sections of the article should be written in plain terms and concepts that can be understood by any literate reader of Wikipedia without any knowledge in the given field before advancing to more detailed explanations of the topic. While wikilinks should be provided for advanced terms and concepts in that field, articles should be written on the assumption that the reader will not follow these links, instead attempting to infer their meaning from the text

The problem I find with many of the special interest wikiprojects, is that the articles get rated by people on the project who understand the subject and they forget that the articles should be accessible to everyone. It's only when they get put up for GA or FA review that the problems become apparent. If you think of a print encyclopaedia like the Encyclopeadia Britannica they were traditionally bought by people with families who wanted good comprehensive reference works for school projects so they were aimed at children between the ages of about 9-16, which is what we should be aiming for. Actually, I've been editing for just over a year now and I only discovered yesterday there's a gadget on "preferences" that makes adding citations a lot easier. Richerman (talk) 13:15, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Emphasis on the phrase bought by. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia. But there is a catch: Wikipedia is a do it yourself encyclopedia. Wikipedia doesn't pay its contributors; they write only for their own enjoyment. Wikipedia contributors write for themselves. Thus if someone finds something they don't like about Wikipedia, the response is WP:SOFIXIT - the burden of making Wikipedia understandable rests on the person who doesn't understand something. That is, in fact, a great strength of collaborative editing: nobody knows better than you do what you don't understand. So if something isn't clear, then clarify it. The first step is to look up all the jargon terms, and make sure they have links. Read all the linked-to articles, and then come back and try to clarify the jargon-laced confusion. If millions of people read Wikipedia, and each one clarifies just one sentence they initially found confusing, the result will be better than any one expert could have written. Yes, Wikipedia "should" be all sorts of wonderful things, in the ideal fantasy world where everyone is a world-class writer willing to slave endlessly at no pay on behalf of others, but in practice, Wikipedia is whatever its readers feel like making it, subject to all sorts of constraints, including self-interest and laziness. In its current implementation, Wikipedia promotes quick edits and tends to punish excessive effort. The more you change what is already there, the more likely other users are to change your work. Thus there is little incentive to invest great effort into editing material that any other user can simply delete. After watching chunks of one's work going poof, one tires of fighting to defend one's contributions, and instead looks for things to add that don't go poof as readily (such as navigation templates, actually a great tool for improving understandability and generally less likely to ignite edit wars). Traditional print encyclopedias also have it far easier in that they don't cover as many topics as Wikipedia does. I'm sure we can find some Britannica-sized subsets of Wikipedia that are as understandable to the layman as Britannica. But Britannica doesn't have anything like Wikipedia's depth of coverage on lots of complex scholarly or professional fields. Can we expect to make topics such as abstract algebra or tensor calculus understandable to children ages 9-16? Parts of Wikipedia compare to Britannica, while other parts compare to specialist encyclopedias such as the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. Kirk-Othmer certainly doesn't target ages 9-16; it's a working tool for chemical engineers and industrial chemists. If we did a proper usability study on Wikipedia, we'd probably find that most readers don't get much beyond the lead sections of articles anyway, so if we can at least make the leads understandable, we may be satisfying 90% of the audience. Really, all Wikipedia asks of anyone is to leave things slightly better than you found them. Give us enough slight improvers, and we will move the Earth, like trillions of earthworms quietly reshaping the landscape, one little mouthful of dirt at a time. --Teratornis (talk) 07:32, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, such a poetic note is probably a good place to end the discusion before we get told off for straying outside what should be discussed on the talk page for this article (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!) One day we may change the world, but we've made a small start with this article - onward and upward!!! Richerman (talk) 11:02, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Under "Please Fix", the relevant unit would be deaths per TWH, not deaths per TW. I believe the dwarfing will not be so marked. windaction dot ord has statistics on accidents and deaths, but not including deaths or severe injuries from manufacturing or transporting WT parts or assemblies, which are very relevant, given the comparative bulk and count of WT compared to coal facilities per lifetime TWH production. - Tom Stacy —Preceding unsigned comment added by Save Western Ohio (talk • contribs) 18:18, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

more intermittency
Don;t know why people are still concerned about this as an issue - its a done deal. There is simply no evidence to show that intermittency iwth large or huge penetrations of wind, is going to be any more of a problem than it is with existing power stations which can and do stop suddenly unexpectedly. There are plenty of technologies to deal with it - at the very least you simply start the existing power stations which are kept in readiness. Czisch shows that even with 70% renewables costs can be comparable to present day costs. Face the facts - the future is large scale wind and inter connectors. sorry if this sounds arrogant but we have endlessly discussed the issues and covered how they are soluble. Lets move on. Intermittency of wind is no more of an issue for wind than it is for other forms of power generation and the INTERMITTENCY OF EXISTING LOADS. Engineman (talk) 08:09, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

From wikipedia "windpower"

Penetration

Wind energy "penetration" refers to the fraction of energy produced by wind compared with the total available generation capacity. There is no generally accepted "maximum" level of wind penetration. The limit for a particular grid will depend on the existing generating plants, pricing mechanisms, capacity for storage or demand management, and other factors. An interconnected electricity grid will already include reserve generating and transmission capacity to allow for equipment failures; this reserve capacity can also serve to regulate for the varying power generation by wind plants. Studies have indicated that 20% of the total electrical energy consumption may be incorporated with minimal difficulty.[41] These studies have been for locations with geographically dispersed wind farms, some degree of dispatchable energy, or hydropower with storage capacity, demand management, and interconnection to a large grid area export of electricity when needed. Beyond this level, there are few technical limits, but the economic implications become more significant.

However In evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee, the UK System Operator, National Grid have quoted estimates of balancing costs for 40% wind and these lie in the range £500-1000M per annum. "These balancing costs represent an additional £6 to £12 per annum on average consumer electricity bill of around £390."[42]

At present, few grid systems have penetration of wind energy above 5%: Denmark (values over 18%), Spain and Portugal (values over 9%), Germany and the Republic of Ireland (values over 6%). The Danish grid is heavily interconnected to the European electrical grid, and it has solved grid management problems by exporting almost half of its wind power to Norway. The correlation between electricity export and wind power production is very strong.[43]

Denmark has active plans to increase the percentage of power generated to over 50%.[44]

A study commissioned by the state of Minnesota considered penetration of up to 25%, and concluded that integration issues would be manageable and have incremental costs of less than one-half cent ($0.0045) per kWh.[45]

ESB National Grid, Ireland's electric utility, in a 2004 study that, concluded that to meet the renewable energy targets set by the EU in 2001 would "increase electricity generation costs by a modest 15%"[46]

A recent report by Sinclair Merz[47] saw no difficulty in accommodating 50% of total power delivered in the UK at modest cost increases.


 * Well I'm not going to argue with you about this, but I think I'll wait until I see a country producing anywhere near 50% of their electricity from wind and not exporting a huge portion of that before I start yelling from the belfries. Papers are one thing, actually demonstrating it is another. TastyCakes (talk) 18:12, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, sure, there will always be some problems when going from the lab to the field, but the scientists and engineers will stay on the problem and make it work. There were also problems with every other type of utility-scale energy. Is exporting wind-generated electricity a bad thing? The world maintains vigorous trade in many other forms of energy: petroleum, natural gas, coal, uranium, etc. Trade is only possible between willing sellers and buyers, which means Denmark cannot export its transient wind surpluses unless its neighbors want to buy the electricity - presumably the buyers perceive a benefit, I doubt they are simply handing Denmark a favor. Other energy markets resolve geographic imbalances between supply and demand; Saudi Arabia, for example, exports most of its petroleum extraction. While the energy trade can cause some problems, until now I hadn't heard of someone objecting to, say, petroleum because the markets are far from the wells. Do you consider the electricity trade between member nations of the European Community to be different than that between the member states of the United States, or the provinces of China? China and the U.S. constitute vast electricity markets comparable in scale to all of Europe, and in all three of those markets huge amounts of electricity shift around in constantly changing patterns, depending on when the hydro plants have strong flow, or when a nuclear plant goes offline for a month, etc. The city of Los Angeles already imports electricity from all over the western U.S. Even if wind were not a factor, France would still be exporting some of its nuclear-generated electricity to improve the economics of its nuclear plants, and Norway would want to link its hydro plants into its neighbors' grids to deal with the seasonal intermittency of its river flows (during the Nordic winter, precipitation accumulates as snowpack, which melts in the spring to replenish the reservoirs; Norway would rather use wind power in winter, when available, than burn its dwindling supply of natural gas). Norway can soak up Denmark's excess wind power, to conserve water for its hydro plants. I can't imagine what is objectionable about such trade. It seems no different to me than Ohio importing coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin (other than wind being vastly cleaner than coal of course). Moving coal around is not difficult; we have railroads and river barges in the U.S. Yes, the growth in wind power is going to force the construction of SuperGrids and Smart grids, but we would want to do that anyway to gain better efficiency and sharing of transient surpluses. If someone wants to draw a line around a small village and run it 100% from local wind, then some sort of energy-storage technology will be necessary (e.g., Wind-hydrogen hybrid power systems, or a big pile of biomass to feed a biogas plant or a combined heat and power plant, or maybe someday ultracapacitors such as if EEStor makes good on its hype) - these types of projects have only been done on relatively small scale so far. But maybe storage technology will improve in the next 10 or 20 years, as might smart grid technology. We can expect Moore's law to continue making equipment smarter - perhaps someday, electricity grids will be able to shed loads gracefully in response to loss of supply, in the order of priority determined in advance by each consumer. --Teratornis (talk) 00:30, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't dispute anything you're saying, my argument (as spelled out below) is that a small country generating a high percentage of its electricity with wind is fundamentally different than the system overall generating a high percentage of its electricity with wind. TastyCakes (talk) 16:34, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * What is your problem with exporting wind power? Thats the whole point of interconnection - you export surpluses and re import it during times of low wind, becasue it is much cheaper than storage or running backup plant - as does Denmark....Engineman (talk) 01:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I have no problem at all with exporting power. But it completely changes the argument.  Achieving 50% of all the electricity generated within the complete system (say the European or North American grids) may be completely implausible, but a small country (or state/province) could quite conceivably make 50% of the electricity it generates with wind and then export it to a relatively large nearby market.  Do you see why I consider that to be a misleading argument for what percentage society as a whole can rely on wind power?  In Canada, PEI is talking about becoming just such an exporter, but PEI is tiny so it really doesn't matter.  People that live on a wind farm could generate 100% of their electricity from wind and "export" 99% of it, and that's fantastic.  But it doesn't really prove anything about the big picture.   Also, please put your comments at the bottom of the discussion and stop cutting off other peoples' stuff.  TastyCakes (talk) 16:30, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

NPOV
There has been a lot of talk about the articles on wind and intermittent power sources. not having NPOV over the issue of intermittency, as if there is some sort of debate and wikipedia has to show some balance. But there is no debate. None of the professional studies have shown any insurmountable and unaffordable problems with integrating large, ie over 50 % wind into power systems. It should not have to be for those who have read these sources of information to have to defend against a non existent case. There is simply no professional evidence to the contrary. So the NPOV is quite simply that intermittency of large amounts of wind is a non issue - to the extent that it can be dealt with using known techniques and that it does not impose major costs or unreliability on power systems. If you disagree with this, please cite some professional studies. Engineman (talk) 06:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * You talk in absolutes a lot... In case you forget, the reason I brought all this up in the first place was the line someone (you?) put in the intro:
 * The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power to supply a low proportion of total demand. Where wind is to be used for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs for compensation of intermittency are considered to be modest.
 * My problem with it as the intro of a Wikipedia article are, I think, obvious: it doesn't really say anything concrete, but it says it in such a way to suggest everything is totally awesome with wind. How about adding what constitutes "seldom", "problem", a "low proportion", a "moderate fraction" and "modest additional costs"?  Surely if there is as strong a consensus on the generalities as you suggest, there is similar agreement on the concrete definitions of these terms?
 * You say intermittency is no more of an issue than any other generation method. I'm sorry but I have not been convinced of this: wind by its very nature is unpredictable and I am sure designers of electrical systems with a large wind component have to consider intermittency (particularly unpredictable intermittency) more than designers of, say, a coal plant.  Saying the issues have been effectively tackled is one thing, saying they are "non-issues" is another.  TastyCakes (talk) 16:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Dear TastyCakes - actually I didn't write the intro but it is a perfectly clear and accurate summary of the opinion reached by experts who have reviewed all sorts of other expert reports and data - have you read the UKERC report which more or less ends up saying what the intro says? I don;t think it is for me to convince you of anything, its the other way round. All the expert evidence, is that whilst intermittency is clearly a factor, it is not a limiting issue, and that wind can therefore economically supply energy in large grids. Have you read the IEA article and Czisch' papers ? - he indicates 70% wind is economic, ? You may not like it, or think it is true, in an engineering sense, but that is the view contained in the engineering and economic evidence? You keep saying you don;t accept this, but can i ask, on what evidence, other than your own opinion? Have you done any modeling? Have you published anything? Which expert articles lead you to your misgivings?
 * I have read some of the papers and am in the process of reading others. As I am not in the business of wind power, nor an expert on the matter by any means, I of course have not published or modeled anything.  Have you?  Are you aware of wikipedia's policy of original research?  TastyCakes (talk) 19:04, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

I think you queried somewhere why nuclear needed pumped storage - its really the opposite of winds issue - its is generally flat in output, and in UK the pumped storage was intended to take nighttime nuclear and use it during the daytime peak. Nuclear is also very intermittent - 6 months ago blackouts occurred in UK because Sizewell B nuclear power station suddenly sloped - 1.2 GW in micro seconds - far worse rate of change than a wind farm closing down, which at least will have a weather forecast. Denmark is by the way aiming for 50% wind by 2050 I think.Engineman (talk) 03:04, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * So you are saying pumped storage is as vital and integral to nuclear as to a high % wind power scheme? TastyCakes (talk) 17:17, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I really don't think you're addressing the things I'm saying here. Does anyone else care to weigh in?  Is it really plausible to generate 70% of humanities electricity through wind?  50%?  Is the sentence I've taken issue with in the intro really clear, accurate and neutral?  Like I said earlier, I really don't want to argue about this stuff with you (engineman).  I just think the last sentence in the intro is poor.  TastyCakes (talk) 07:54, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The question is not whether you (or anyone else here) thinks it is plausible or not to generate 70% of electricity from wind. The question is, are there any reliable sources that claim that integrating large wind power is a problem? Splette :) How's my driving? 08:14, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree. TastyCakes (talk) 17:17, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The original claim was that "for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs ... are considered to be modest." Are you saying that 70% is a "moderate fraction"? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Engineman's UK report characterizes >20% as "high penetrations".
 * —WWoods (talk) 20:37, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Dear tasty cakes - you might want to look at thus presentation - http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/156/

the author is the ex director of the West Denmark Power Grid, where as he says they are studying, and indeed planning for 50% wind by 2025. It looks like in the long term they are expecting 100% renewable. Dr Czisch has modelled 100% renewable, 70% wind and 30% biomass chp http://www.claverton-energy.com/european-super-grid.html. Suggest you read his study. The UKERC study brings together numerous previous studies and pretty much says that there are no problems in 20% wind penetration by energy supply http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/145/ which is the point yu seem to take issue with. Have you read these? Can you cite any evidence which supports your view? Engineman (talk) 10:31, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * My view that high wind penetration is not a trivial matter that is a "non-issue"? The claverton page you cite gives very interesting and exciting claims.  But do they not all depend on a European supergrid?  Is the creation of such a grid a trivial technical matter?  The site itself says "This largely confounds the claims of various energy experts who claim renewables cannot meet UK power needs", and (from the former head of Shell): "Real time balancing of current flows in super grids is a massive unsolved technical challenge, but it is one that we have to face".  The page suggests that they are of course wrong, but it certainly doesn't mesh with your claim that "there is no debate" on this matter.
 * The view from the UK electrical board is also interesting. Perhaps you  missed page 10 where in recommendations for future studies it includes:
 * Options for managing the additional power fluctuations on the system due to intermittency –including new supply technologies, the role of load management, energy storage etc. Opportunities and challenges for re-optimisation of the electricity system in the long term to cope with intermittent generation, including research on much higher penetrations of renewable sources than the relatively modest levels considered in this report. (bold added)
 * Indeed, if you read the report you will see they are talking about penetration up to 20%. It should also be noted that articles in the Economist and elsewhere like this one continue to cast dispersions on the claims of Britain fulfilling 15% of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2020. This paper says vastly increasing Germany's reliance on wind power would be difficult if not impossible due to unavailability of pumped storage capacity.  And the fact that all of your sources give different maximum penetrations makes it seem to me that the debate is not over.
 * But you have dodged the jist of my argument yet again. The sentence in the intro is totally unquantified.  That may be alright in the conclusions of a fluffy government report talking about how vital it is to get Britain off of fossil fuels, but that does not make it suitable for an encyclopedia entry. When it says "low proportion of demand", does it mean 1%, 5%, 20%?  When it says moderate portion of demand does it mean 10%, 20%, 50%?  When it says compensation for moderate demand is modest, does it mean the construction of unproved technology such as a super grid or the use of pumped storage that may or may not be available to all countries in all situations?  By failing to have this in these sentences it is missing the objectivity the intro should have.
 * I'm not trying to dump on anyone's parade here, I think wind power is a fantastic technology that is going to grow immensely in the coming decades. But I think it is premature to make claims like the ones implied in the intro sentences.  A lot of respected groups have published reports that do not predict overall (ie not for relatively small countries such as Denmark) high wind penetration in the coming decades, such as this one by the NPC and this new one from the IEA (see page 10).  The only reason I can see for that being the case is that they remain to be convinced that the technical, logistical and economic challenges facing a high percentage of wind adoption have been solved.  So yes I do bristle when you brush such issues aside by throwing hundreds of pages of semi-relevant reports at me.  TastyCakes (talk) 19:04, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * To reply to the earlier question of whether pumped storage is essential to nuclear power: basically, yes. See Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - most of those plants were built years before wind power became significant, to perform diurnal load-leveling with coal and nuclear plants, whose operating characteristics are almost as mismatched to demand as wind is, although for what we might consider an "opposite" reason, wanting to operate at full output around the clock, whereas demand may vary by more than a factor of two on a daily basis. However, most pumped hydro storage plants have a limited capacity, only perhaps one or two days of full output at most, so they are good for daily peak power; they cannot by themselves compensate for extended unscheduled outages of a nuclear plant, which may go down for weeks at a time. (However, pumped storage would still help with meeting the daily peak demand, as other baseload plants could help charge them up at night while the nuclear plant gets repaired.) Nuclear plants don't fail very often, but when they do, the impact of a single failure may be worse for the grid than the worst-case failure for a collection of geographically dispersed, interlinked wind farms. For all the wind farms to go down and stay down for weeks might be a once in 500 years weather event (the exact figure would become clearer after the farms had accumulated some years of operating data), but for a nuclear plant a failure of comparable magnitude is common enough to be a familiar event. This is not an argument against nuclear power, just an observation that nuclear power creates its own grid-management problems, but grid operators figured out how to solve them (although not 100% of the time, there are still occasional blackouts), and these problems are not showstoppers for nuclear power. --Teratornis (talk) 19:32, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The availability of grid energy storage may be a limiting factor for the maximum share of wind power on particular grids. Suitable sites for conventional pumped hydro storage may be limited. However, people are working on alternatives such as Compressed air energy storage, underground reservoirs for pumped hydro, ultracapacitors, Vehicle to grid, etc. Ultracapacitors are interesting because they could become cheap and powerful enough to replace on-site Emergency power systems. As more consumers integrate their backup generation or storage into a Smart grid, the resulting virtual grid storage plant would have the advantage of incremental expandability and distributed robustness. This is in contrast to pumped hydro plants which typically require years to build, and then also present a single point of failure. --Teratornis (talk) 19:48, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Lots of power consumers already install Emergency power systems, even before wind power achieves high penetration. This suggests that the existing power mix has enough reliability problems to motivate consumers to see to their own power security. The present technology for emergency power relies undesirably on diesel or gasoline from petroleum. Consumers would presumably prefer to store electrical energy from the grid, since the energy would be cheaper than liquid fuel, and refueling would be automatic. If ultracapacitors become cheaper than diesel generators for emergency backup, this would allow for almost any penetration of wind power. The home or business backup units could pay for themselves with a smart grid that spot-prices electricity according to its availability. I.e., when the wind is blowing, electricity becomes cheap, and all the smart backup units soak up all the power they can. --Teratornis (talk) 20:00, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * One might view tiny Denmark's export of wind power as somehow "cheating" on the intermittency problem, because it raises the question of what happens when everybody else installs lots of wind power. Who will Denmark then export to? Well, as we know, the wind blows differently in different places. When the wind is blowing hard in Denmark, it might be calm in Spain, and vice versa, hence the need for a SuperGrid. But even if Denmark had no connections with its neighbors, in the worst case it could shut down some wind turbines temporarily in the event of more wind than it can use. This would merely be a loss of some potential revenue, not a technical failure of its wind system. When the wind stopped blowing, Denmark could restart its fossil plants. The maximum percentage of annual electrical energy that Denmark could obtain from the wind would depend on how much grid energy storage it had, to avoid running its fossil plants during low-wind conditions. The maximum percentage would almost certainly be higher than the economically optimal percentage, depending on how one chooses to price the carbon-based fossil fuels. It's hard to talk about the maximum penetration of wind power right now because all of the major power grids are years away. Thus we are discussing a future problem, and Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. The picture in ten years might be very different, after people have had ten years to attack the intermittency problem, along with an increasing motivation to attack it. Also note that nobody is going to install 100% wind power, other than perhaps a few isolated settlements. Wind power is merely the first of the so-called "new renewables" to become economically viable. Other renewable sources such as Solar power and Hot dry rock geothermal energy appear to be nearing economic viability, and as their availability characteristics are much different than wind, they will tend to offset its intermittencies to some extent. We can also expect further technical improvements in wind power, such as building more wind farms offshore, and using taller towers, which increase the capacity factor. If airborne wind turbines ever work, then wind power has the same capacity factor as nuclear (up to 90%, as high-altitude winds can be very consistent). We can have high confidence that Moore's law has some years left to run, which means that in ten or twenty years when wind power is getting big, embedded computers will be up to thousands of times smarter than what we can build today. Even if there wasn't going to be any wind power, there was already motivation to build the Smart grid because of the high economic costs of the blackouts we are having already. Having said all that, I agree as I stated before that the vague sentence in the lead section violates WP:WEASEL and needs to become more specific. If nothing else, we should clearly state who is claiming the "modest costs" and for what specific grid. --Teratornis (talk) 20:28, 22 November 2008 (UTC)


 * From http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/145/ :
 * 27. The aggregate ‘costs of intermittency’ are made up of additional short-run balancing costs and the additional longer term costs associated with maintaining reliability via an adequate system margin. Intermittency costs in Britain are of the order of £5 to £8/MWh, made up of £2 to £3/MWh from short-run balancing costs and £3 to £5/MWh from the cost of maintaining a higher system margin. For comparison, the direct costs of wind generation would typically be approximately £30 to £55/MWh. If shared between all consumers the impact of intermittency on electricity prices would be of the order 0.1 to 0.15 p/kWh.
 * I.e. a premium of ~15%. Not huge, but not "no problems" either.
 * 28. These estimates assume that intermittent generation is primarily wind, that it is geographically widespread, and that it accounts for no more than about 20% of electricity supply. At current penetration levels costs are much lower, since the costs of intermittency rise as penetrations increase. If intermittent generation were clustered geographically, or if the market share were to rise above 20%, intermittency costs would rise above these estimates, and/or more radical changes would be needed in order to accommodate renewables.


 * From "Analysis of Wind Power in the Danish Electricity Supply in 2005 and 2006" link to pdf here / bootleg copy?


 * It is often said that wind power covers ca. 20% of Danish electricity consumption. It is more correct to say that the production of power by Danish wind turbines corresponds to about 20% of electricity demand. But a considerable part of the wind energy produced is exported to neighbouring countries and thus does not cover any part of Danish electricity consumption.


 * ... It is evident that the widely held contention that wind power covers about 20% of Danish electricity demand is wrong. In 2005 the cover of Danish internal demand was 13.6% and in 2006 it was 10.3%.


 * ... Trend curves suggest that when production is doubled from 20% to 40% of demand over several years, the degree of cover will rise from 14% to, at most, 20% on average.


 * One must keep an eye on this result when setting targets for the share of wind power in future electricity demand. For it to reach the values desired by politicians, an extensive modification of all the Danish energy supply system is necessary. Over the last 50 years, Denmark has built up an exemplary system, in which the co-production of electricity and heat (heat and power) is one of its most important corner-stones. A greater reliance on wind power will result in this system being largely phased out.


 * So if Denmark doubles its wind power generation, it'll have to triple its exports. It can do that if it builds enough transmission capacity, but that means it's relatively meaningless to say that Danish wind power is X% of Danish consumption. Danish wind power is a much smaller fraction of a much larger north European market. For the UK, that might not be true; how much power can it trade with France and Ireland?
 * —WWoods (talk) 20:37, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Some points:
 * A 15% premium for wind intermittency is well within the potential range of future cost increases in fossil fuels. Does anyone imagine fossil fuels will not rise at least that much in the next ten years? In ten years, the world might be well into a difficult or catastrophic post-peak oil scenario, with the oil available to oil-importing nations dropping by 4% to 10% each year.
 * There is also, as I mentioned, the question of technology improvements going forward. Many people are attacking the storage problem from many angles. Military organizations, for example, increasingly depend on tactical computers, thus they have a tremendous incentive to lighten the infantryman's load with better batteries. Ultracapacitors may eventually rival liquid fuels in terms of energy density and become cheap enough to compete in the Emergency power system market. Low-cost photovoltaic cells from companies such as Nanosolar may eventually deliver on the press release hype. If solar cells and ultracapacitors become cheap enough, an increasing number of buildings will be at least able to meet their priority needs for electricity even with a protracted grid power cut. (When you lose power from the grid, the greatest benefit comes from the first 100 watts or so that you can generate yourself, so you can have basic communication, and perhaps run a light or two. People can always wait until later to run their blow dryers and so on. Having more power is nice in a blackout, but it has decreasing marginal returns.) A lot can change in the ten years it will take to build out wind to levels that could create grid-wide intermittency problems, especially when people generally realize wind is coming and we must prepare to use a lot of it.
 * How much of the electricity that Denmark imports comes from wind? Denmark's neighbors are adding more wind power to their grids. When Denmark needs to import electricity during its low-wind periods, some of that electricity might be coming from wind farms in Germany, Norway, Spain, etc. When Europe builds its SuperGrid, then almost certainly lots of wind power will shift around the continent. It's unlikely for a single weather system to overwhelm all of Europe, although it might occasionally happen.
 * Denmark has oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, but these must run out eventually. The U.K. and Norway have already peaked in petroleum extraction and are in steep decline. The U.K. has already gone from an oil exporting nation to a net importer. It won't matter how wonderfully efficient the Danish Combined heat and power plants are when there is nothing left to fuel them with. The Danes should use all the wind power they can to extend the life of their fossil reserves, which are after all finite and thus guaranteed to run out someday. Improving the efficiency of fossil fuel use is always a good idea, but it can never be more than a temporary stopgap because fossil fuels themselves are nothing more than a temporary stopgap. When you look at the resources the Danes have, in the long run it's going to be wind, or competing for whatever they can import. Crying about intermittency does not put more oil in the ground. They (and everybody else) have no choice but to solve the intermittency problem, or simply learn to live with it (which is essentially what demand management means).
 * Denmark could build more wind turbines and use the excess electricity to generate renewable ammonia. The Norwegians did that at their Vemork hydroelectric plant from 1911 to 1971. They only stopped because natural gas became a cheaper source of hydrogen via steam reforming to feed the Haber process. When Europe runs short of natural gas, the price will rise again. Iceland has been generating small amounts of renewable ammonia for fertilizer using their cheap hydro power for years, because Iceland doesn't have any natural gas. (Natural gas occurs only in sedimentary rocks, and Iceland is entirely volcanic.)
 * If the Danes move toward a hydrogen economy, that will solve their intermittency problem. Then they will be able to benefit from as many wind turbines as they can build, because hydrogen is cheap to store for long periods in underground caverns.
 * --Teratornis (talk) 21:31, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
 * These are all interesting technologies and issues, but all seem speculative to some degree. IMO, the article should focus on wind power now. What it could be in the future should be secondary.  TastyCakes (talk) 04:01, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

back up to wind power
It is unlikely that any form of storage is likely to become economic to store electricity for the week long periods of no wind over large parts of Europe in a high wind scenario. The simple way out of this, is to use the existing fossil stations, which will not be closed, but started up for these 10% or so of the year when needed, and or to borrow ( and or bank / payback when there is a surplus in the borrowing country) wind energy from distant regions. HVDC losses are a mere 3% per 1000 km. Longest one presently is the 1500 km 500 MW link from the Inga Dam to Shaba. The costs of keeping power stations on standby is in fact very low if shared out over the wind units generated during the rest of the year - about 0.75p/kwh.Engineman (talk) 04:06, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
 * High-voltage direct current puts the transmission loss at 3% per 1000 km. For comparison, from Copenhagen to Gibraltar is 2568 km. Thus all of Spain's wind farms are theoretically within 10% loss range for HVDC transmission to Denmark, although there would be local transmission losses to get the power from the wind farms to and from the nearest HVDC substations. --Teratornis (talk) 21:48, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Dear Terratonis - good point, but the local distribution losses are irrelevant in this discussion because they will occur whatever form of power generation is in used - local or transnational. For discussion or relative costs see Engineman (talk) 01:42, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I mentioned the additional transmission losses for completeness. Of course the losses would be similar for a given run of AC transmission regardless of whether there is also an intervening HVDC line. It's interesting to compare the HVDC transmission loss to alternative approaches such as grid energy storage. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is currently the most practical form of large-scale grid energy storage, and it's only about 75% efficient. Wherever it is economical to consider building a pumped-storage facility, and taking the 25% energy loss, it is also probably economical to consider importing electricity from as far away as a 25% loss would represent. For HVDC that could be something like 7000 km. Local grid storage might have other offsetting advantages, such as robustness. --Teratornis (talk) 03:31, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Also I might add that the longer wind outages tend to occur in summer, the time when solar power peaks. Europe has less solar resource than other parts of the world, but the Sahara Desert is within HVDC range and receives enough sunshine to power several Europes - actually, several whole Earths. But even before developing the Sahara, Europe will start with the more accessible southern parts of Spain and Italy which have respectable solar resources to develop. The main drawback with solar is that it currently costs more than wind, but technology is improving and may become cheaper than fossil by 2015 or so. It is unlikely for Europe to experience a Europe-wide drop in both wind and solar power for a whole week. But even if this happens, many industrial regions have survived longer power outages in the past. If Europe continues its present dangerous level of dependence on fossil fuels, it could experience outages of indefinite duration in the future. At least with renewables, the very worst case might be a week's outage every few years, but even that should be avoidable with some planning. An important first step is to prioritize all the uses for electricity, so the load shedding can be graceful in the event of a long outage. Everyone should do this regardless of which power sources they have, since every power source can fail. Currently, we just stupidly cut off the power to a whole region, when we could voluntarily shut off the less essential uses first and keep the priority uses going for days longer. --Teratornis (talk) 22:55, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Danish exports
"So if Denmark doubles its wind power generation, it'll have to triple its exports. It can do that if it builds enough transmission capacity, but that means it's relatively meaningless to say that Danish wind power is X% of Danish consumption. Danish wind power is a much smaller fraction of a much larger north European market. For the UK, that might not be true; how much power can it trade with France and Ireland?"

- —WWoods (talk) 20:37, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

'but that means it's relatively meaningless to say that Danish wind power is X% of Danish consumption."

Not at all - it doesn't matter how much is exported, as long as it gets it back when short, which is what happens in Denmark - they are effectively using Norway's hydro as storage. Norway has gone on record as wanting to be the "battery of europe" UK can trade as much as it wants with France, Norway or Iceland, simply but building the extra links. UK has 2 GW at the moment, built to help the French out with their inflexibly nuclear, and is building an third. Costs of cables to Norway are not very expensive - around 1 billion per GW. Any way, what is the problem with export ? CO@ is a global problem.Engineman (talk) 01:50, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Engineman, are you being deliberately obtuse? The whole point behind WWoods statement is that a large percentage of Danish electricity production is wind, but it has not been able to have as high a percentage of its electricity consumption be wind.  You are totally ignoring what he was driving at.  If you are suggesting a large portion of Denmarks electricity imports is in fact hydro power generated by wind-pumped storage, you have a semi-point, but I doubt that is the case (if you can show otherwise, please do).
 * But, since you bring the topic up, Britain currently imports about 3% of the electricity it produces in country and exports less than 1% (see here). This number would doubtless have to expand significantly to do what you claim, so it seems to me (especially using HVDC), "not very expensive" seems pretty optimistic. TastyCakes (talk) 04:22, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The problem is determining the maximum amount of electricity an average consumer on the grid can get from wind, which would fix the maximum penetration of wind on the whole grid. If Denmark generates x% of Danish consumption from the wind, but it sells half of its wind energy to its neighbors, then the actual percentage of consumption from the wind needs a bigger denominator: the total electricity consumption of the whole market that is absorbing the wind power. The nation of Denmark might be like Sweetwater, Texas, America's wind power capital. Sweetwater's surrounding wind farms generate far more electricity than the local residents consume, so you could not meaningfully calculate the penetration of wind power in Sweetwater alone, you'd have to use the whole market of surrounding areas that buy the electricity. If a large concentration of wind farms are in a restricted geographical region, they will often experience similar weather, and thus their outputs will be statistically correlated. There will be some windless periods during which local consumers will have to get their electricity either from local grid storage, from local non-wind power plants, or by importing electricity from some other region. However, the electricity they import from elsewhere could also come from wind, since the wind is always blowing somewhere. To determine the maximum penetration for wind power in all of Europe, one has to know about the statistical correlation of all European wind farms. For example, if the overall capacity factor of Europe's wind farms is 25%, what percentage of the time will the output fall below, say, 10%? Or 5%? What is the lowest total output one needs to design against, and how long would it persist? How often does one expect a wind slump that lasts long enough to drain all of Europe's pumped storage plants? All of Europe's wind farms are within the theoretical reach of an HVDC supergrid, so grid planners need to know the probability distribution of Europe-wide wind slumps. It doesn't matter that Denmark gets 60 days each year of little or no output from its own wind turbines - what matters is how many of those days are also calm in Spain, and the U.K., etc. A weather map for a whole continent usually shows large fronts and convection cells, with areas having no wind, surrounded or bordered by areas with lots of wind, and these areas continually shift around. Speaking of Norway as the battery of Europe, here's a reference:
 * Currently, Norway is effectively "wasting" much of its existing hydroelectric capacity as baseload power, since it doesn't have enough river flow to run its hydro plants at full capacity continuously. Norway would be better off using wind power to conserve water when it can, and only run its hydro plants when the wind stops (subject to constraints for regulating reservoir heights and tailrace flows). Whatever a power grid possesses in hydro power, it can possibly double or triple with wind power, by uprating its hydro plants with additional generators so they can provide lots of power for short periods. And again, if there are any technological breakthroughs in storage (e.g., ultracapacitors), that could be a game-changer. The money I have already spent on low-capacity uninterruptible power supplies for my computers over the years (with their far from durable lead-acid batteries) is comparable to the price EEstor claims for its future 50kWh home backup system (which would cover me for about a week even if I didn't try to conserve), and even residential customers could pay for such investments if we had a smart grid which priced power according to instantaneous availability. Since I live in an area dominated by coal-fired baseload plants, the real cost of electricity at night is probably about half of the real cost during the day, but my current "dumb" metering charges me the same price at all times. When individual consumers can start to see spot pricing, and sell back electricity to the grid at the time of highest price, an efficient market for grid storage could develop, scaling all the way down to individual consumers. See Vehicle to grid. --Teratornis (talk) 04:57, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Another interesting point about Denmark is that it has slowed the pace of adding wind power to its local grid, essentially leveling off since 2003. Not only does Denmark export much of its wind-generated electricity, it exports an even higher proportion of its wind turbines. This suggests that the marginal utility of installing more wind power in Denmark is lower than selling the wind turbines to relatively undeveloped foreign markets. Most of the rest of the world is far from having enough installed wind power to become an issue yet, beyond some local difficulties (such as some wind farms in the U.S. being unable to find transmission bandwith at times to accept their full output when winds are strong). The rest of the world will need until perhaps 2020 to start seeing Denmark percentages of wind capacity, giving us time to start breaking ground on all the pumped hydro and supergrids we are going to be needing badly by then. North America has a number of potential pumped hydro sites around the Great Lakes, where the shores are steep in some locations (particularly around the north shore of Lake Superior - Canada might end up being "America's battery" in addition to America's tar sands pit). --Teratornis (talk) 05:10, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Another interesting point about Denmark is that it has slowed the pace of adding wind power to its local grid, essentially leveling off since 2003. Not only does Denmark export much of its wind-generated electricity, it exports an even higher proportion of its wind turbines. This suggests that the marginal utility of installing more wind power in Denmark is lower than selling the wind turbines to relatively undeveloped foreign markets. Most of the rest of the world is far from having enough installed wind power to become an issue yet, beyond some local difficulties (such as some wind farms in the U.S. being unable to find transmission bandwith at times to accept their full output when winds are strong). The rest of the world will need until perhaps 2020 to start seeing Denmark percentages of wind capacity, giving us time to start breaking ground on all the pumped hydro and supergrids we are going to be needing badly by then. North America has a number of potential pumped hydro sites around the Great Lakes, where the shores are steep in some locations (particularly around the north shore of Lake Superior - Canada might end up being "America's battery" in addition to America's tar sands pit). --Teratornis (talk) 05:10, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

modeling studies and Denmark
Arguing over what percentage of Danish wind goes to consumers is bit of a red herring. Who cares what the actual figure is - they are planning for 50% and it is implied they are in the long term looking to 75% then 100%.

The answers to many of the points raised in the previous paragraphs have been studied by various authors but in great detail by Czisch. He shows, for a real years worth of weather, that 70% of Europe's power could come from wind, without having to increase hydro storage or any other storage, and the other 30% coming from waste biomass chp.

It not just Czisch - even the hopeless IEA (the Energy Watchdog that forgot to bark about peak oil) has made it clear that we will need more hvdc to cope with the widespread introduction of wind. So far wind power is the only show in town - no other renewable technology is remotely close to it in cost terms.

Can anyone who disagrees with his assessment come up with any evidence to the contrary, other than theoretical musings?Engineman (talk) 07:19, 24 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Are you suggesting we put in the article something along the lines of "we can provide 70% of Europe's electricity with wind power using current technology and having a reasonable cost"? Does that really sound like a consensus opinion to you?  "need more HVDC" is hardly the same claim, and it sounds much more reasonable to put in the article.  Denmark is a red herring but not in the way you are suggesting.  As I've said several times now, a small country that produces a large percentage of wind power and exports a significant amount of it does not prove that the overall system can produce a similar amount of its electricity that way, and the fact that it consumes a lower percentage of wind power than it produces only reinforces the doubt.
 * If you want Czisch's study mentioned in the article, fine, say that he has modeled a system where Europe gets 70% of its electricity from wind. But please, please stop talking as if 70% penetration is a "done deal", a "consensus opinion" and that we're all idiots for not "seeing the light".  TastyCakes (talk) 15:37, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Speaking of cost, on another forum where I listen to people argue, one poster insists that Nanosolar is already making solar cells that are cheaper than wind turbines. This doesn't quite square with everything else I read, which says solar won't be reasonably competitive until 2015 or so. Between Nanosolar and EEstor, if the delivery is even half as good as the press releases, all our energy problems are about to be solved. Somehow I'm not optimistic, as few things ever deliver in the field what they promise in the lab. Look at how wind power has taken 30 years of trial and error development to become a credible player. I'm sure that switching to wind on a large scale will create gotchas that no study accurately predicts. But the same is true of every energy alternative, especially for business-as-usual which seems almost certain either to destroy the biosphere with runaway global warming or collapse civilization in a post-peak oil catastrophe. There are already countries which scrape by with intermittent electricity, such as Iraq where blackouts have occurred daily in some places since the U.S. invasion. Even if grid managers cannot solve the intermittency problems, in the worst case people can just learn to live with them. Humans throughout history have had to adjust their schedules to follow the vagaries of weather. Only in the last 100 years or so have a minority of privileged humans been able to draw down fossil fuels at an exponentially increasing rate to create a temporary illusion that human schedules override nature's schedules. In the future, people may have to learn how to schedule some of their energy-consuming activities to correspond to periods of high wind, just as construction workers wait for dry days to pour concrete outside. --Teratornis (talk) 09:37, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Danish Wind
Engineman (talk) 03:53, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

MWh     Wind Power Exported  Hours   Produced     %    Consumption    % West  2007   597.701   3710   6.646.881    9,0   21.595.508   30,8 East  2007   505.341   5306   2.293.800   22,0   14.515.894   15,8 Q 1   52.536    387   1.989.069    2,6 44.529   463     668.816    6,7               Q 2   236.488   1559     987.668   23,9 205.683  2048     289.912   70,9               Q 3   273.489   1454   1.362.043   20,1 197.449  2015     264.832   74,6               Q 4    35.189    310   1.222.932    2,9 57.680   780     386.811   14,9

Sorry - don't know how to format this as a table - original data at: http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/160/ plus further comment.Engineman (talk) 04:24, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Looks to me like about 11% of wind generation is exported in 2007, so about 22% of Denmark's power is directly used in country. The reason on shore installation is dropping off is i understand that they have run out of sites and so are now looking off shore. The Norwegians, in addition to going on record as offering to be the battery of Europe (which of course implies they heed to be linked to Europe with maybe 25 GW of cables)are building floating offshore turbines, and there is ample room in the North Sea to generate all Europeans power.

I think Terratonis is quite right to point out the utility of ammonia from electrolysis of water as being another use for otherwise spill wind power. http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/159/ Engineman (talk) 04:23, 25 November 2008 (UTC) Vehicle to grid means that spare ammonia can feed power back into the grid as required. There are 2000 Gw of vehicle engines on UK roads, compared to 70 GW of power stationEngineman (talk) 04:10, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I put your text into nowiki tags with a leading space before the first tag. See Help:Wikitext examples. To align the columns properly, you need to replace your tab characters (ugh) with spaces (yay). While we are picking on Denmark, it is rather remarkable that the Danish Wikipedia's Wind power article is just a stub! Denmark fares better on the English Wikipedia; Wind power in Denmark mentions a Danish plan to replace their gasoline/petrol cars with battery cars, and use Vehicle to grid to provide 5x Denmark's backup capacity needs. However, replacing a vehicle fleet takes decades, and battery technology still does not compete well with liquid fuel for power, refill times, and range. However, ultracapacitors might narrow the gap considerably in a few years. I'm a bit curious about what happens if a fully-charged ultracapacitor bank gets burned or crushed in an accident - where does the stored energy go? --Teratornis (talk) 09:20, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that Terratornis.....I personally think the whole hydrogen / battery / capacity thing is a scam to divert attention. Hydrogen is never going to be an answer. But with ammonia you could literally start running vehicles on it .....well ....today.....It doesn't require decades to turn the technology over as it will more or less run in existing engines with a bit of modification - so i am led to believe.Engineman (talk) 11:12, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, ammonia has some problems beginning with its toxicity, and the fact that even a small leak of ammonia renders the atmosphere unbreathable for hundreds of meters. Every vehicle with a tankful of ammonia becomes a weapon of mass destruction. Of course a tank full of petrol is almost as destructive. But even if ammonia could work in existing cars with affordable modification, there is still the difficulty in building the infrastructure to handle it in large volumes. If you've ever been near an ammonia plant, you know there are inevitably some leaks. Having ammonia filling stations on every street corner could make living in a city almost intolerable. Ammonia is dangerous even when handled by professionals. It's hard to imagine what technology for handling ammonia could be consumer-proof. However, even apart from fuel a lot of ammonia goes to fertilizer today. Excess wind power could generate renewable ammonia for agriculture and chemical industry use, sparing natural gas which could then be used for transport until it runs out. I have some notes at User:Teratornis/Energy. One way to solve the intermittency problem for wind is to build more capacity than you need, and use the excess power during windy spells to generate hydrogen to feed a renewable ammonia industry. Both hydrogen and ammonia are easy to store in industrial volumes. A renewable ammonia industry could soak up tremendous amounts of excess power and generate a valuable product. Neither hydrogen nor ammonia are convenient (yet) to use as a portable energy carrier, but lots of people are working on hydrogen storage at least. --Teratornis (talk) 23:12, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

If you can get natural gas in and out of cars without much of a leak - I would have thought the same could be done with ammonia? The stuff is tankered around USA in vast quantities and injected into the soil without much difficult.Engineman (talk) 02:19, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism
The Wind power article is getting vandalized several times per day, almost always by unregistered users. This makes the article inconvenient to edit, as one must always check to make sure one is not adding onto a vandalized revision (which makes reverting the vandalism harder). Can we semi-protect the article for a while? At least until the pace of needed constructive edits declines? When the article stabilizes then we can throw it back to the vandals. --Teratornis (talk) 23:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Danish 50% windpower by 2025 - offshore
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/infocus/story?id=46749 December 5, 2006 Denmark to Increase Wind Power to 50% by 2025, Mostly Offshore Findings released from eight-year study on offshore wind farms in Denmark show projects "operate in harmony with the surrounding environment." Engineman (talk)

Danish wind production update
Er Terratornis - could you work your table magic again please? Engineman

Fred,

I am sorry that some of the figures in my first table were wrong.

I hope that this one is perfect:

Wind energy produced in 2007 was too high in the old table.

It means that the correct wind energy share at national level was 19.9 % in 2007.

Sorry for any inconvenience if you forwarded the data to anybody else.

Kind regards,

Paul Engineman (talk) 03:29, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

more ammonia as an engine fuel
This link demolishes any concerns about the practicality and safety of ammonia. http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/163/.

This is another good link:

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=799

Can someone copy the rather good bus picture in?

Regarding the fact that we would need to increae the production of ammonia by a factore of 10,000 - well you can of course go back in history no more than 100 year and find a point where gasoline useage was less than some point in the futre by a factor of 10,000. That really proves nothing.Engineman (talk) 16:27, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't this discussion be taking place at the ammonia and maybe alternative energy pages? This is going way off topic, IMO.  TastyCakes (talk) 23:43, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Or perhaps Talk:Hydrogen economy since the subject is under Hydrogen economy. This is off topic from wind power, but it's a difficult digression to avoid given the never-ending questions about the intermittency of wind. Proposals such as the hydrogen economy are part of the larger engineering response to the intermittency of wind and solar. If wind or solar power are to be usable on large scales, intermittency will force many downstream adaptations. I might add that while the conventional technology of Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is adequate for buffering daily variations in wind, it lacks capacity to help much with seasonal variations. For example, this report on a wind resource measurement from a monitoring mast on the Cleveland, Ohio water crib found four times as much energy from the wind during the late fall and winter compared to summer:
 * Much of the Great Lakes region might have a similar seasonal variation. If so, that bodes ill for meeting summertime peak demands when a high proportion of grid electricity in the region comes from wind, unless a seasonal-scale form of grid energy storage is available (such as underground cavern hydrogen storage), or there is a similarly large implementation of solar power which has the opposite seasonal intermittency, peaking nicely in summer. Unfortunately for the short term, solar power development is approximately where wind power was about ten years ago:
 * In 2007, the U.S. installed 5244 MW of new wind power and 254 MW of solar (a 20-1 disparity). The lopsided growth may lead to more problems with seasonal intermittency than would occur if solar could catch up to wind. On the other hand, the U.S. electricity market is so huge that wind will probably need another 5-10 years to become large enough to begin impacting grid stability, by which time advances in thin-film solar cells might be turning the states of Arizona and New Mexico into America's summertime peaking power plant.
 * As to the issue of going back 100 years to observe a factor of ten thousand growth, I think we all understand that given enough time (and stable economic conditions in the meantime), just about anything is possible, but humans may not have the luxury of unlimited time to solve the energy problem. Peak oil proponents claim the supply of petroleum may begin declining precipitously at any time, without warning, and global warming proponents make similarly dire predictions about the planetary climate passing through irreversible thresholds in as little as 10 or 20 years in a business-as-usual scenario. Thus the relevant time scale is not 100 years, but more like something a few of us might live to see. As to whether ammonia becomes the transportation fuel of choice, a lot probably depends on advances in battery technology or ultracapacitors. Internal combustion engines are a rather poor method for using an energy carrier that results from electricity, since the tank-to-wheels efficiency is typically around 20%. The plug-to-wheels efficiency of battery electric vehicles can be as high as 80%. Thus if you are starting with electricity, you get up to four times as much effective vehicle fuel by using batteries or capacitors as from creating a liquid fuel to burn in an internal combustion engine. This makes it unlikely that a large-scale, decades-long project to build up, say, an ammonia fuel infrastructure could attract sufficient investors when they would know that a breakthrough in battery technology could decimate their market at any time. Unless, of course, someone invents a cheap reliable high-efficiency fuel cell that runs on ammonia, which might raise the tank-to-wheels efficiency up to battery levels. But that would mean junking the existing combustion-engined vehicle fleet, so the pace of adoption would have to be slow (the same as for battery electric vehicles). --Teratornis (talk) 22:50, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * In 2007, the U.S. installed 5244 MW of new wind power and 254 MW of solar (a 20-1 disparity). The lopsided growth may lead to more problems with seasonal intermittency than would occur if solar could catch up to wind. On the other hand, the U.S. electricity market is so huge that wind will probably need another 5-10 years to become large enough to begin impacting grid stability, by which time advances in thin-film solar cells might be turning the states of Arizona and New Mexico into America's summertime peaking power plant.
 * As to the issue of going back 100 years to observe a factor of ten thousand growth, I think we all understand that given enough time (and stable economic conditions in the meantime), just about anything is possible, but humans may not have the luxury of unlimited time to solve the energy problem. Peak oil proponents claim the supply of petroleum may begin declining precipitously at any time, without warning, and global warming proponents make similarly dire predictions about the planetary climate passing through irreversible thresholds in as little as 10 or 20 years in a business-as-usual scenario. Thus the relevant time scale is not 100 years, but more like something a few of us might live to see. As to whether ammonia becomes the transportation fuel of choice, a lot probably depends on advances in battery technology or ultracapacitors. Internal combustion engines are a rather poor method for using an energy carrier that results from electricity, since the tank-to-wheels efficiency is typically around 20%. The plug-to-wheels efficiency of battery electric vehicles can be as high as 80%. Thus if you are starting with electricity, you get up to four times as much effective vehicle fuel by using batteries or capacitors as from creating a liquid fuel to burn in an internal combustion engine. This makes it unlikely that a large-scale, decades-long project to build up, say, an ammonia fuel infrastructure could attract sufficient investors when they would know that a breakthrough in battery technology could decimate their market at any time. Unless, of course, someone invents a cheap reliable high-efficiency fuel cell that runs on ammonia, which might raise the tank-to-wheels efficiency up to battery levels. But that would mean junking the existing combustion-engined vehicle fleet, so the pace of adoption would have to be slow (the same as for battery electric vehicles). --Teratornis (talk) 22:50, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Wind power in other language Wikipedias
I just created Translate wikipedia to give a more compact syntax than the already-existing general-purpose Google translation for translating articles from other language Wikipedias to English. Several Wikipedias in languages of major wind power countries (German, Spanish, Danish, etc.) have some interesting articles about wind power. In many cases there are data and images we can also use here on the English Wikipedia. (Some images are not yet on Commons, so someone would have to move them to Commons before we could use them here.) For example: The results of the machine translation are far from perfect, but are for the most part readable enough if you already understand the technical content of wind power. Google's translation feature has a size limit which yields only partial translation on the longer articles. --Teratornis (talk) 23:01, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

modelling
Are people aware of Dr Gregor Czisch's work on modeling the costs and effects of a European hvdc power grid and various combinations of renewables?

He concludes from memory, amongst other things:

70% wind, 30% waste biomass chp plus existing hydro storage would provide 100% renewable electricity at today's power prices. Concentrating solar nor pv are anywhere near as economic as wind power. His work has been presented at a number of gatherings of experts at governmental level and has not as far as i am aware been faulted.

The EU has recently announced plans for such a super grid, mainly to outwit the Russians. In the US Al Gore, and Obama are planning a similar country wide grid. Wind power is the fastest growing form of power generation - 25% per annum.Engineman (talk) 03:22, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Dr Mark Barratt of UCL Dr Mark Barrett, Principal RCUK Academic Research Fellow Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/markbarrett/Index.html has reached similar conclusions looking at the UK only. (I think he includes a bit of tidal and wave power)

Barrats model works by running an entire real UK weather scenario over the UK, and then optimizing the required mix of basically wind and biomassede powered chp. I think he needs an 8GW inter connector compared to the present 2 GW.
 * Is this the extent of the "consensus" you claim experts on the issues facing high levels of wind penetration have reached? TastyCakes (talk) 04:05, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
 * An interesting review paper User:Johnfos brought to my attention; Sustainable energy already cites it:
 * The paper gives the highest ranking to wind power among the alternative energy sources it examines. Solar also ranks high, but the author is from California which has a huge solar resource in the Mojave Desert (nothing remotely like that at the U.K.'s latitude I'm afraid - probably should have staked a territorial claim after kicking Rommel out of Libya) . Section 10 of the paper surveys some methods for dealing with the intermittency of wind. --Teratornis (talk) 07:59, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
 * The paper gives the highest ranking to wind power among the alternative energy sources it examines. Solar also ranks high, but the author is from California which has a huge solar resource in the Mojave Desert (nothing remotely like that at the U.K.'s latitude I'm afraid - probably should have staked a territorial claim after kicking Rommel out of Libya) . Section 10 of the paper surveys some methods for dealing with the intermittency of wind. --Teratornis (talk) 07:59, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Bad Grammar

 * Well spotted, I've changed them, but please feel free to change things like this yourself. Wikipedia is improved by people like you correcting omissions and mistakes. Richerman (talk) 17:03, 5 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Another one spotted. The last paragraph of the "Environmental Effects" section has a typo. It notes "Some people claim that the noise, consisting of both audible as inaudible low frequencies...". That should be "...audible as well as inaudible..."--Swithich (talk) 03:31, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Fixed - but why on Earth not fix it yourself instead of wasting space on the talk page? It's less overall effort, quicker, and avoids cranky messages like this one. Be bold and all that. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:47, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Special:Contributions/Swithich shows only these two edits. Let us try to remember WP:BITE and the mind-numbing nature of Wikipedia for those new to the game. If User:Swithich is as new as the brief edit history suggests, I'm impressed that he/she has already figured out tables. --Teratornis (talk) 06:50, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

further danish wind energy update - how much is used in Denmark and how much is exported?
The original author of the two tables has now revised the data and it is published in an article here:

http://www.claverton-energy.com/danish-wind-power-and-electricity-export-in-2007.html Still puzzles me why it is considered so important - take away the boundary of countries, it doesn't alter how much was generated - and it all goes to reducing coal generation somewhere in Europe. Whether or not any is expoerted, it still contains a useful orientation of the facts to say that "Denmakr generates 20%, (or whatever ) of its annual power consumptionEngineman (talk) 09:21, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
 * It's been stated a number of times why this is important. "Take away the boundary of countries" and Europe as a whole generates a few percentage of its electricity by wind, not 20% as the small component Denmark does.  Denmark on its own does not prove that a system as a whole can generate 20% of its electricity from wind, at least not unless 20% of its consumption also comes from wind. Which, according to this article, it doesn't. TastyCakes (talk) 21:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
 * As long as we are splitting hairs, we should split them accurately. The appropriate boundary to draw around Denmark's wind power production would contain only those electricity consumers who consume some of Denmark's electricity exports. Given that Europe has relatively few long-distance HVDC interties yet, I doubt that much if any electricity from Denmark travels as far as, say, Spain. The losses from AC transmission would be extremely high for such a distance. Most of the trade is probably with Denmark's neighbors such as Germany, Norway, and Sweden. Those four countries together constitute a much larger control volume than Denmark alone, but only a fraction of Europe. The fraction of electricity from wind is increasing in Denmark's neighboring countries, making it possible that Denmark already imports some wind-generated electricity (for example, if the wind slows in Denmark but continues to blow in Germany). In any case, the fact that Denmark exports some wind power doesn't prove that Denmark needs to, it only suggests that Denmark is saving some money by doing so. Unless Denmark's wind turbines are producing more than 100% of Denmark's electricity consumption at a given moment, Denmark could consume all of its own wind power if it needed to. And if the wind turbines were producing more than 100% of the Danish spot demand, they could shut down a few turbines in the worst case. Apparently Denmark exports some wind power because the rest of Denmark's generating stations lack the flexibility to throttle back their output when the wind is up, or because a country like Norway is set up better to buy power on the spot market (because of Norway's high proportion of hydroelectric plants). --Teratornis (talk) 00:26, 9 December 2008 (UTC)


 * It matters because people make arguments along the lines of 'Denmark relies on wind for 20% of its power with only minor problems, therefore the whole EU/UK/US could do the same.' But Denmark isn't a power island. The more accurate argument would be that 'northern Europe relies on wind for 5% (or whatever) of its power with only minor problems, therefore...'.
 * —WWoods (talk) 18:13, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * But we should state the facts clearly. State how much electricity they consume, how much wind power they generate, and how much wind power they export, if that can be determined.
 * Denmark produced 25,800 TJ of wind power and consumed 121,857 TJ of electricity in 2007 http://www.ens.dk/sw16508.asp --
 * The “tightness” of the Danish grid is needed to trade power between its Nordic neighbors in the north and Germany in the south. Norway, Sweden, and Finland hold more than 120 GWh of pumped hydroelectric capacity that they send through Denmark into Germany and the rest of Europe, so that roughly three times the amount of energy needed in Denmark is passing through its wires on most days. The traded volume of power is truly massive: more than 250 TWh in 2006 (Figure 5). Huge flows of power go from the Nordic countries through Denmark during the day to meet peak demand below in Europe, where spot prices are higher, and then reverse direction during the night as the pumped hydro facilities are recharged. Early in the morning, from midnight to around 1:00 a.m., spot prices for power in Germany and Denmark are often $18.07 per MWh while they are from $36.16 to $42.55 per MWh in Sweden, Finland, and Norway (with an average system price of $37.07 per MWh). From noon to 1:00 p.m., in contrast, they are $127.10 per MWh in Denmark and Germany and only $41.20 to $45.33 per MWh in the Nordic countries (with an average system price of $45.02 per MWh). Thus, Denmark's neighbors supply significant amounts of regulating power helping balance wind energy at low cost.
 * Skyemoor (talk) 18:32, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * By comparison, the Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant has a capacity of 1600 MW for 22 hours, or about 35 GWh. The lesson here is that the intermittency of demand for electricity (due to the overwhelming preference of humans to sleep at night and be active during the day, which might however change a bit when more consumers get Smart Grids and discover they can cut their power bills in half by going nocturnal) has already motivated the development of technology which is about equally useful for handling intermittency of supply. A given capacity of wind power merely requires a larger capacity of the same kind of load leveling technology that baseload plants have required as long as they have been around. However, as I mentioned above, the seasonal variation of wind power probably limits its maximum penetration on a grid in much the same way as the seasonal variation in river flows limits the maximum penetration of hydro, since we don't yet have any proven technology which can function as seasonal-scale grid energy storage. (Pumped storage plants lose water to leakage and evaporation, so they need to turn over their reservoirs frequently to remain efficient, and they lack the capacity to store more than a few days' worth of energy in any case.) If someone develops an economical way to store electrical energy on a seasonal scale (Underground cavern hydrogen storage?), then there is no limit to the penetration of wind power on a grid, as the annual wind resource is constant to within a few percent. --Teratornis (talk) 19:56, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Terratornis, does this mean that the Danes effectively get a lot of their exported wind power back when it is not windy, or during high demand periods?Engineman (talk) 08:05, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
 * That depends on what you mean. The Danes are getting electricity back, some of which might be returned wind power from pumped-storage hydro plants in Norway. If the Danes are selling off-peak surplus wind power and buying back peak power (at higher spot prices), whoever owns the pumped-storage plants can only be happy with that arrangement. In the future, if someone develops a practical method for adiabatic compressed air energy storage, that could solve the intermittency/variability problems for wind power, at least on daily to weekly scales, since there are many salt domes amenable to solution mining to create the necessary underground storage caverns, with few NIMBY problems. (Adiabatic schemes involve storing the heat of compression along with the compressed air, to re-heat the air upon subsequent expansion, thereby eliminating the need to burn fuel when operating in power return mode. This is necessary to make compressed air storage free from fossil fuels.) In contrast, relatively few locations are suitable for pumped storage hydroelectric plants. Seasonal wind variation may continue to be a limiting factor for high wind power penetrations, although as I've mentioned before, solar power tends to have the opposite seasonal variation from wind, peaking in summer rather than winter. --Teratornis (talk) 22:10, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Wind power high altitude
Wind is usually stronger and more dependable at high altitudes. There are recent approaches that attempt to exploit this kind of energy:

KIT GEN Project aimed at use the Wing profiles that semi vaulting at high altitude as a carousel of kits to keep in altitude anchored to a big horizontal windmill whose anchoring ground cables both control the wings movements through computer and take energy by the movement of such cables.

MAGENN AIR ROTOR SYSTEM (M.A.R.S.) Project aimed at the exploitation of the Magnus effect on a aerostatic balloon able to rotate on its axis and generate so power through a couple of alternators connected to the ends of such balloon.

LADDERMILL project From the researchers of the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands). In the Laddermill project the characteristics of the kits are used: a mechanism to yo-yo can let go sailing up to over 800 meters above the ground and then recall it to the ground through a cable, creating energy by the coil is wound on the wire checks.

SKY WINDPOWER Project aimed at the use of the motors on the model of the helicopters that running the blades by the wind, rise to high altitude and simultaneously generate electricity in proportion to be transmitted to the ground through the  Anchor cables they  are connected.

TWIND technology It is based on the use of a couple of captive balloons at an altitude of 800 metres, on a rotating platform able to follow the direction of the wind and through cables working also as motion transmission element. A balloon opens the sail connected to it, and while this balloon is kept away by the force of high altitude winds pushing on the surface of the sail, the other balloon, at close sail, is taken on the vertical of the platform, drawn by the same cable connected to the first balloon. At the end of cable unwinding, once it is at run end, an automatic mechanism operates the closing of sail wings of the first balloon and it operates the opening of sail wings of the second; in this way the functions of the two balloons reverse, repeating the same dynamic. Above method allows to obtain energy by means of continue alternate movement of cable hooked to the two aerostatic balloons.

LINKS —Preceding unsigned comment added by Evavitali (talk • contribs)
 * KIT GEN project
 * MAGENN AIR ROTOR SYSTEM (M.A.R.S.)
 * LADDERMILL research
 * SKY WINDPOWER project
 * TWIND technology
 * And the point is...? This is a Talk page for discussing improvements to the Wind power article. Wikipedia has an Airborne wind turbine article which is the appropriate place to write properly sourced information about these speculative schemes. I left links on your user talk page to pages that explain how to edit articles on Wikipedia. Note that Wikipedia is not a crystal ball, and the whole field of airborne wind turbines remains largely speculative, with few schemes even reaching the working prototype stage despite years of discussion. This means it takes a brave and hopefully experienced editor to write about airborne wind turbines, because other Wikipedia editors will automatically be biased against material which is merely speculative. It's much easier to write about things which actually exist, and for which reliable, third-party published sources are easy to find. If you are interested in speculative discussion of future energy schemes, you might try another wiki such as Pure Energy Systems Wiki. Anyone interested in unproven energy schemes must be patient, however, as every large-scale energy-producing technology has required decades to develop. It's instructive to study the development of the conventional horizontal-axis wind turbine, which despite seeming to be simple and straightforward has required about 30 years of painstaking refinement to become viable for utility-scale power. Making things work in the real world is rarely as simple as it initially appears. Another problem for airborne wind turbines is the huge success of conventional wind turbines, which competes strongly for personnel and investment against alternative wind power schemes. Who is going to risk large sums on unproven technology as long as windy places like North Dakota have vast areas suitable for building conventional wind farms with a high probability of reliable return on investment? Also, I might point out that the biggest difficulty for the reader is trying to visualize what these speculative schemes for airborne wind turbines look like. Verbal descriptions alone are nearly useless, for example who can understand the TWIND description which appears to have suffered from translation into English? For these speculative schemes, the greatest need on Wikipedia is to have good illustrations. The only usable illustration of an airborne wind turbine I have found so far is commons:File:Airborne wind generator.svg, which depicts an airborne wind turbine of the aerostat variety. If you can find or draw freely-licensed illustrations like that one, that would really help. --Teratornis (talk) 22:44, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Another point: various people have created stubby articles about some of these airborne wind turbines, but other editors have tended to turn them into redirects to the Airborne wind turbine article. Thus we once had a (poor quality) article about KiteGen, but now it is merely a redirect to the somewhat better article. It's difficult to write a good article about a subject such as KiteGen, because there are few sources of information about the subject other than the vendor's Web site. That's a problem for things that don't exist yet in the real world, but only in the imaginations of a few people. Until the KiteGen people produce at least a working prototype and allow the public to scrutinize it, it is not easy to write about on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and as such we look more to the past and present than to the future. Much of the future is inherently unknowable anyway, which means writing about the future readily leads to content disputes. --Teratornis (talk) 23:01, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Wind power photos
I've been sorting wind power photos over at Commons, moving suitably free wind-power-related photos from the English Wikipedia to Commons, copying some wind power photos from Flickr and U.S. Government sites, and adding Commonscat to articles that have corresponding categories on Commons (such as to link Wind power in Ohio with commons:Category:Wind power in Ohio). I encourage all interested users to browse through the category hierarchy at commons:Category:Wind power and look for photos you can use in wind-power-related articles that currently lack enough photos, or any photos. I've also tried, with some success, to identify the wind farms and locations in some photos that the original uploaders did not label clearly. (Some people who are not wind power enthusiasts notice wind turbines and photograph them, without always understanding the importance of documenting the where or what, but usually they specify the when which can be useful for ruling out wind turbines we know were installed later.) One of these days I might actually photograph something, but there is so much material by other people that could use better organizing for our nefarious purposes that I'm focusing on that first. I wrote some notes that may be helpful to others who want to learn more about finding or uploading wind power images: --Teratornis (talk) 08:36, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
 * commons:User:Teratornis
 * commons:User:Teratornis/Gallery
 * User:Teratornis/Energy (lots of general notes)
 * User:Teratornis/Energy (my interest in this subtopic was part of my motivation to look for photos)
 * User:Teratornis/Notes
 * User:Teratornis/Notes

New Efficiency Section in Wind Power or Wind Turbines?
Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wind_turbine#Article_needs_Wind-Harvesting_Efficiency_Examples to comment on whether such a proposed section would be more useful in a generalized format in this article rather than in Wind_turbine. Navuoy (talk) 17:53, 31 December 2008 (UTC)