A more promising idea is to use existing storage facilities, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where careful coordination of wind production with hydroelectric production could significantly improve the value of both resources.

Achieving utility-level reliability with wind turbines with 35% availability requires the installation of 20 wind turbines at 20 carefully matched locations without storage. The cost of the multiple turbines is easy enough to calculate. The investment required in transmission facilities and controls to move their output and respond to their intermittency is a more difficult calculation. The wind turbines would produce significantly more power that their "reliable" output, but that power is of substantially lower value because of its intermittency.

Achieving utility-level reliability with a combination of wind turbines and storage has significant potential to reduce the transmission facilities and controls investment required to support a "reliable" wind power source. The question that must still be answered is the investment required in the wind generation and storage system to achieve reliable output.

It is not obvious that the cost of the reliable output of a wind/storage energy system would be even marginally competitive with conventional alternatives for the forseeable future. The cost of relying on "source of opportunity" wind energy to a much greater degree than we presently do would likely be grid instability, particularly as the wind energy fraction of the generating resource approached the conventionally-fueled capacity reserve margin in the market. California has embarked on a course to demonstrate this situation with its aggressive RPS and low capacity reserve margin. The results of this demonstration should be very interesting, if not very satisfying.

The information on the planned wind development in the Tantramar marshes noted that 19 wind turbines will be erected in the Amherst Wind Energy Project, with a total of 31 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and that the total cost will be about $60 million Canadian (plus). It was described as likely to produce about 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity each year – or enough to supply about 10,000 homes, but said nothing about being able to do this only some of the time. The installed cost works out to about C$3.1 million, for each 1.6 megawatt windmill. If each windmill were to operate at full power for the entire year, then each would produce 14 million kWh (14,000 MWh or 14 GWh), and all of them would produce about 266 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity. Thus the operators are assuming that these windmills will spin for an average of about 37% of the year at full capacity to produce the estimated 100 GWh (or 5.3 GWh per windmill). Even the 5,000 plus windmills in the Altamont pass, high in the hills of California, can only manage to operate about 20% of the time on average, so the assumption of 37% may be over-optimistic. Data from Denmark, Germany and Spain suggest that less than 20% (15%) is more likely.

However, let us assume for now that the 37% is correct, until actual operating experience provides better data. If one scales up this power output to match that of our local operating 680 MW nuclear reactor at Point Lepreau, which has operated at a lifetime factor of about 83% for the last 23 years (and allowing for only 630 MW of net capacity, as 50 MW of the 680 MW station, supplies the in-station needs), then Point Lepreau generates an average of 4,580 GWh each year. The equivalent output from the Amherst Project windmills operating 37% of the time, would require 864 of them, costing close to $2.7 billion of capital cost, or about twice the cost of the much-criticized Lepreau re-furbishment of about $1.4 billion! If, as is more likely, the average operating time is about 20%, then the equivalent windmill cost (1600 of them) becomes about $5 billion, or almost four times the cost of the nuclear facility for the same power production. The over-riding problem with wind power is that it occurs on an intermittent, unreliable, and unpredictable basis that requires dedicated standby operation of a reliable source of power (nuclear, coal, or imports) that must be constantly available within seconds. This logically requires that the assumed costs of wind should also include the costs of the needed standby generation.

As one must build and have, the necessary reliable replacement power on hand – along with all of its costs - for those times when the wind does not blow, the obvious question should be asked: why bother with wind power at all? It is a surplus and un-needed environmentalist dream that causes capital costs of electrical energy derived from it, to be a factor of three to five and more, higher than the cost of electricity from the reliable ‘standby’ asset - in this case - Nuclear Power. The owners of windmills in the Altamont pass area are now being forced by rational and concerned environmentalists to consider shutting down many of their windmills for about 2 months of the year, during bird migration episodes.

Similar projects with similar very high costs relative to nuclear power are planned and under construction in Manitoba (Schneider Power), and at Melancthon and Grey Highlands in Ontario. All have the same multiple costs of nuclear; are intermittent, and all require reliable backup.

Gigawatt for gigawatt, this makes the wind project electricity cost more than three times higher than that of most nuclear electricity. Definitely not a good deal.

Without an assured and guaranteed electricity supply there is no water supply; no sewage pumps to dispose of sewage; no elevators to serve tall buildings; no industry; few jobs; no frozen and unspoiled food in supermarkets; no quality to life. Welcome back to the age of wind.

The greenest and most reliable energy of all is nuclear power.

Second, the whole point of this article (which is not that well done in my opinion) was to show that there are viable storage mechanisms for wind power. The article doesn't discuss cost, which is a major oversight. However, probably the best way to deal with wind's intermittency is to simply have a geographically diverse system of wind farms, so that when the wind is not blowing somewhere, it is blowing elsewhere. Germany and Denmark are currently targeting wind for significant portions of their electricity sector, without new balancing generation (Germany's DENA found that wind could rise as high as 14% of total generation w/ no need for balancing generation) partly because of geographic diversity.

There's also a recent study out of the Netherlands stating that nuclear power plants, when one considers the life cycle emissions, have 20-40% of the greenhouse gas emissions as a modern natural gas plant. And as high quality uranium becomes less available (there's only so much), the emissions may soon exceed that from the equivalent natural gas power plant. So the nuclear industry's claim that nuclear power is somehow "clean" is becoming more and more propagandistic.

Tam Hunt Santa Barbara

As for your nuclear comment: I am sure that you remember that to most anti-nuclear groups it was the singular focus upon high capital costs that was supposedly the nail in the coffin for nuclear power. They were most anxious that one did not get into looking at longer term total costs, as that would prove that they were being deliberately mendacious. Well I am pointing out that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. We cannot afford the high capital cost for wind, considering how totally unreliable it is.

Your comment that we can ‘deal with wind's intermittency is to simply have a geographically diverse system of wind farms’, is naïve to the extreme, in an industrialized society. You would be piling redundancy upon redundancy and it still would not work. If there were even just one day in the year when your regional fine weather system blanketed a larger region than you had counted on, you had still better have all of the reliable backup supply spinning, ready to take up the load.

This focus on capital cost alone – in the case of nuclear power in the US – was also disingenuous, as it was politicians and ‘green’ groups that were instrumental in driving up those nuclear capital costs, with layer upon layer of political dithering and obstruction, needless over-regulation, changing the ground rules, court delays and court challenges to oppose various licenses, and then finding sympathetic politicians who would make it impossible to get an operating license for whatever reason seemed good at the polls, even when the reactor was ready to ramp up to power (Dukakis and Shoreham). When a three year project expands to a decade and more based upon nothing more than such obstruction, of course capital costs become unmanageable. Industry and Utilities do not build any facilities, of any kind, under those conditions.

Furthermore, when one looks at fuel and operating and maintenance costs, nuclear is more than competitive with coal at this time in terms of electrical production costs (Utility Data Institute) – despite the extremely non-level playing field, as the external and very significant costs (health effects) of coal are still ignored (Externe project). Nuclear also has a very large advantage over oil and gas at this time, both of which are mostly foreign and of uncertain availability and price. In fact, if one includes longer term operating costs, nuclear power has a very significant financial advantage over any fossil fuel, which is why the existing reactors are being relicensed and upgraded rather than retired. They are major cash cows for the utilities that now own them.

The main point of my comment was however, Capital Cost. In their entire life-cycle, nuclear facilities built in other countries, without the political baggage and obstruction, recover their costs in a very few years, as have most if not all of the US reactors at this time. With their even larger capital costs, some wind projects may never be able to recover their capital costs without much higher ‘green pricing’. The lure of tax write-offs and gold-plated depreciation rules, selectively high pricing, forced purchases by utilities, and being allowed to use existing transmission lines which they do not build or contribute to, are major investor attractions. As for your assumption that the wind operating and maintenance costs are minimal, I disagree. There are high maintenance costs involved with keeping a few thousand windmills operating, and significant accident rates of an army of maintenance workers traveling to the remote and hilly locations in the worst weather. Windmills, freeze up, can be overloaded with ice and snow and topple, or even blow down. They need de-icing heaters and aircraft warning lights and need to be rotated in order not to face serious distortion of the blades if they sit for too long. All of which means that grid flow is too them, not from them, at such times.

As an example of costs that most people should understand. It is like having the choice of say three cars to drive. One (the wind car) will cost you $5 billion, but its operating and maintenance costs are moderate (not minimal) and the fuel is free. The snag is that it only operates about 20% of the time on average, and you never know when the 80% non-operating time is. Another car (the nuclear wheeler) costs about $2 billion. Its operating and maintenance costs are moderate, and you need to pay for fuel, which is comparatively cheap and available. It also can be relied on to operate about 90% of the time. And a lot of the 10% non-operating time, can be chosen by you. The third car (the coal buggy)

The third car (the coal buggy), costs about $1.5 billion. It can also operate about 70 to 90% of the time, but the price of fuel is from twice as expensive to ten times as expensive (CANDU) as the nuclear wheeler. One snag on the horizon is that there could suddenly be a major pollution tax on the fuel, or recognition of the adverse health effects. I can see the class action lawyers sitting patiently in the wings.

You really only need one car if it is the nuclear wheeler or the coal buggy, but the government says you must buy the wind car and pay all of the costs. If you expect to survive, you have to have that second car anyway, and it is the only vehicle you really needed in the first place, but instead you got stiffed for two of them.

The Netherlands study you refer to by Storm Smith and van Leeuwin, is one of the most artfully misleading pieces of non-science bafflegab I have seen in a long time, and it has been adequately refuted many times, especially by the WNA and others. Their analysis of both future nuclear fuel outlook (see my paper at this location: http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=374 and others by me) and carbon dioxide assumptions and contributions (from their supposed nuclear life-cycle) are so outrageously twisted and nonsensical, that even the data masseurs and propagandists in the Rocky Mountain Institute must be envious of them.

The idea that geographically diverse wind farms should be linked by a robust, high voltage transmission grid, is hardly radical. There are good reasons for the grids that we have, and there are good reasons for strengthening those grids--even if wind doesn't become a dominant source of power. Since they are used mostly to import power from distant generators when a big local plant goes offline, long distance transmission lines tend to be underutilized most of the time. Using them for power averaging from wind farms would increase their utilization, without requiring increases in capacity much beyond those needed anyway to restore reliability.

As to the issue of an "extended weather anomoly" when winds are unusually calm over a broad geographical area, there are several answers. In the first place, its underlying premise of "sacred demand" is open to challenge. By "sacred demand", I mean the idea that "demand is demand, and all demand must be met, or the system has failed." What real justification is there for that principle? Sure, in the absence of technology for discriminating categories of loads, the utility has no choice but to bust its balls trying to meet all demand. But there's nothing intrinsically difficult about discriminating loads.

Variable rate structures could be used much more widely than they are to regulate discretionary loads. In some place already, discounted rates are offered to businesses that allow their air conditioners to be equipped with switches so the utility can reduce their duty cycle during power emergencies. So a calm period creates a power shortage? No problem; simply broadcast a code that disables low priority loads. People *can* cut their demand considerably, when they know it's needed to avoid a blackout.

But even if the policy of "sacred demand" remains in place, there's a second answer to extended wind power deficits. That's simply to enable the existing gigawatts of barely used backup generating capacity to start paying its keep. I don't mean peaking units operated by the utilities themselved; I mean all the backup generators at industrial and commercial facilities that mostly sit idle, waiting for a power failure. The value of avoiding unscheduled loss of power makes the investment in rarely used generating capacity worthwhile for many industrial power users. It wouldn't take much in the way of additional capital expenditures to enable those generators to provide power when the grid was operating. The payoff to the companies involved would be substantial.

A third answer is simply the type of energy storage capacity that this article was about. There are other options in addition to those covered, but I won't try to go into them here.

In practice, all three answers can and will be employed to make the "wind car" of John's example a reliable and affordable option.

All the best,

Ron Wagner

Fortunately the lights still come on when we hit the switch, but it has nothing to do with safer and cleaner alternatives. The reason the lights still come on when the customer hits the switch is almost entirely because of two things, one, the inertia of the infrastructure built mostly in an earlier era which gave us tremendous reliability, i.e., a large system of large and small generators spread around the country with a large interconnecting grid network – which is still working, just not as well – and two, a large swing toward natural gas generation. As long as the lights go on when the customer flips the switch there will be no clamoring for nuclear power no matter how well-wrapped in logic we can make it. That is reality too (for now anyway).

As for wind or solar power being viable alternatives to nuclear, they are not in the same ball park. We should abandon the nonsense that they compete before it is too late. Without large storage systems of equal to or greater cost than new generation such as batteries, compressed air, pumped storage or whatever, wind and solar are a mirage.

Incidentally, if anyone should be interested in a field study of flawed energy policy, in which nukes were rejected way-back-when and could have made a difference by now, one needs only to look at the electric power situation in Hawaii, a literal island and a grid island. Not pretty.