by Greg Murphy
Reprinted from the Fall 2001 21st Century Science and Technology magazine.
In the Midwest and other parts of
the country, near-bankrupt farmers
are being sold a bill of goods
by the Department of Energy about
how they should rent (or lease)
their land to be used as “wind
farms,” where “high tech” windmill
turbines will allegedly make them
money by selling electricity to the
power grid. In fact, the only way
wind power can make money, is
with huge government subsidies,
tax breaks, and phoney accounting.
Here’s what the wind-power
windbags are doing, and why it
won’t work.
The push for “alternative energy
sources” goes back to the post-
John F. Kennedy paradigm shift,
when the ruling elites decided to
shift America from an agro-industrial
economy to a post-industrial
service society. The widescale promotion
of anti-technology ecologism—
and fears about the most
efficient available energy source,
nuclear power—were part of that
game plan. This insanity mushroomed
during Jimmy Carter’s Administration,
and has been getting
worse ever since. To increase the
use and development of wind energy
and other renewable sources,
the Clinton Administration modified
its proposed Federal utility
restructuring legislation, mandating
an increase in the percentage
of electricity produced by renewable
sources from 2% today, to
7.5% by the year 2010. (Sen. James
Jeffords (I-Vt.), has proposed to
increase the percentage of electricity
produced by wind to 20%.)
In 1999, Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson, announced the Wind
Powering America Initiative which
set the goal of producing 80,000
megawatts of electricity from wind
power by the year 2020.
To help make wind power more
competitive, the Federal government
provides a 1.5-cent per kilowatt-hour (kwh) Production Tax
Credit for all electricity generated
by new wind plants for the first 10
years of operation. This Production
Tax Credit will expire on December
31, 2001, and the American
Wind Energy Association is currently
lobbying Congress to extend
the tax credit for at least five
more years.
Several states are pushing for
legislation, known as Renewable
Portfolio Standards (RPS), which
mandates that a certain percentage
of electrical power must come from
so-called renewable sources, like
wind power, and that these wind
percentages increase year after
year. Some of the states are giving
tax incentives or rebates for the
purchase of small wind turbines,
as in the case of California, which
currently offers a tax rebate of up
to 50% of the purchase price of the
wind turbine.
Phoney Cost Accounting
The truth that the wind energy
windbags don’t want to tell the
public, is the real cost of production
of wind power! They claim it
is presently around three to six
cents per kilowatt hour—not quite
competitive with other sources,
but in the ballpark. In truth, even
with government subsidies, tax
breaks, and phoney accounting,
the cost is many times that.
In the 1980s, the cost of generating
wind power was about 38
cents per kwh, according to the
November 1998 Renewable Energy
Policy Program report, titled
“Expanding Wind Energy: Can
Americans Afford It?” There have
been improvements in efficiency
of wind turbines, which have come
out of materials and design research
in the aerospace industry.
However, this has been nowhere
near enough to drop generation
cost to the level being claimed. The
three to six cents per kwh claimed
by the industry for wind
power is not a true cost,
but an accounting fiction,
called a levelized cost.
Technically, the levelized
cost of energy, is the
cost in current dollars of
all fuel, capital, and operating
and maintenance
expenses during the lifetime
of the power plant,
divided by the estimated
output in kilowatt-hours
over the lifetime of the
power plant. In the case of
a wind farm, there is no
cost for fuel, but the wind
turbine is dependent on
nature to provide the necessary
wind. The problem
with considering the levelized
cost in the case of
wind energy is that this
cost is figured on the assumption
of a constant maximium
wind for a given area.
In other words, levelized cost
assumes a constant wind, every day
for 20 to 30 years! There is no
place on the Earth that the wind
blows at a constant maximum average
speed all the time.
Further, these calculations are
dishonest about the maintenance
cost, keeping them unrealistically
low. They figure for a wind farm,
which might consist of 100 to 250
windmills, a maintenance crew of
three men and a truck. They also
assume a yearly repair cost at a ridiculously
low total of about $750
a year.
In reality, wind turbines have
considerable down time for repairs
and cleaning. One recent study
found that flying insects—such as
bees, locusts, gnats, and butterflies—
cut the efficiency of turbines
by as much as 25%. Thousands
of insects fly into the turbine
blades and die, forming a ragged
crust on the blades leading
edge. Even a millimetre of this
crust generates drag that can ruin
the turbine’s efficiency.
Another consideration is the
power transmission cost. Even if,
after the 1.5 cents Federal subsidy,
windmills could sell electricity at
six cents per kwh, the power still
has to move along the transmission
grid to the consumer. Because
wind power is an intermittent power
source, rates for access to the
transmission grid are higher. To
counter this, the American Wind
Energy Association is lobbying for
what they call “fair access” to the
transmission grid.
Windmill power will never be
competitive with more modern
forms of energy production. For
one thing, the same improvements
in technology that might make the
wind turbine more efficient would
also improve the efficiency of turbines
turned by coal, oil, gas, and
nuclear. But, even if technological
improvement could miraculously
make the cost of wind power
competitive with modern forms
such as nuclear, would we want it?
Wind Fails Energy Density Test
The fact is that there is a more
important factor than cost-in-thesmall
to be considered in evaluating
an energy source. If you look
at the overall demands for electrical
energy and industrial process
heat in a growing industrial economy,
wind energy could never begin
to provide even a tiny percentage
of what is needed. First, you
must look at the concentration of
energy per area of work, which is
shown as kwh per square kilometre.
Next, you look at what levels
of energy flux density will foster
the increase of the population density.
The energy density of wind is
intrinsically too low to maintain the
population at current levels, and will
lead to population decrease over
time—which is exactly what the
Malthusian environmentalist movement
wants to accomplish.
In order for all mankind to
progress, we have to develop sources
of energy with higher flux density
and develop the technology that
can make use of these sources.
