Here’s Why Small Wind Is a Failure
The course of technological progress isn’t always represented by a positive slope, and in the case of renewable energy there are most definitely a few examples of retrograde motion.
The poster child for all this is small wind, meaning devices whose nameplate is under 100KW (mostly under 10 KW), normally deployed on the rooftops of residential and commercial buildings. The article linked here is just another indication of the fact that this whole sector has always been, and probably will always be, an abject failure.
And I’m not just a reporter here; I’m also an aggrieved stock holder. My client Xzeres gave me shares of its common stock when the market price was $0.30; I was recently forced to cash it in for $0.078 when the company failed and was taken private. My experience with WindStream was just as bad: the warrants I was given with strike price $0.05 are essentially worthless, given that the underlying stock is trading at $0.0001. No, that’s not a typo; it’s one-hundredth of a penny.
Why such an epic fail? Here’s my viewpoint:
• By definition, small wind has to be cheap to produce power at competitive rates. But “cheap” is the enemy of “quality”—especially in engineered products that need to move continuously for years at a time.
• As a commenter notes below, there are several different issues associated with the materials science of turbines and their internal electronics that makes it hard to scale wind energy down effectively; in other words, certain costs don’t come down linearly with diminished size. By contrast, this is a far smaller problem in solar than it is in wind; in fact, of all the difference sources of energy, renewable or otherwise, solar is the only one that scales down nicely.
• People tend to underestimate how terrible the wind conditions are close to the ground. Most of these installations have been in places that are substantially obstructed by trees and other buildings, where the wind tends to swirl and its average velocity is a small fraction of that 100 feet above them.
• Since the industry has so few committed investors, most of the few remaining players have tiny valuations. In cases like these, the CEOs tend to spend more time propping up the company in front of investors than they do in providing a quality product and generating customer satisfaction.
What does this say about the viability of wind energy generally? Absolutely nothing. The levelized cost of utility-scale wind energy is attractive now, and it’s getting better every year as advancements are made in key areas, including materials science and system reliability.
An occasional casualty in the development of renewable energy should be expected; it comes with the territory, just as it does in the evolution of any technology. The only key difference between R&D in renewable energy and most other technologies is that, in the case of renewables, a sustainable civilization for humankind here on Earth hangs in the balance. That’s something worth noting–and perhaps even getting a bit excited about….
Here are some other views on the article Craig in Renewable Energy World, and thanks for putting this article up. These “counter views” to mainstream are all to few and they do play an important balancing view-point.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2016/06/quiet-revolution-vawt-total-flop-says-german-paper.html
Craig,
The biggest issue with the failure of small wind is that it cannot benefit from economy of scale that big wind can… Specifically, the turbine blades are not hollow.
With the big windmills, you have a skin of fiberglass or fiber-composite wrapping a frame for the turbine. The tower hub is also hollow, and made with cheap reinforced steel.
So lengthening the turbine increases the mass of the turbine blade linearly. That’s a linear increase in cost for a quadratic increase in swept area. It’s also linearly increasing the cost to push the tower hub higher into higher capacity winds.
For the small wind, the turbine blades are solid, as is the pole. Increasing the blade length requires a corresponding increase all three dimensions for the blade in order to handle the torque from the wind, so you’re increasing your mass (and cost) by a cubic ratio on the blades to get a quadratic increase in swept area. Increasing the height of the pole would also require a significant increase in all dimensions to handle the greater torque, so the cost there is again increasing at a cubic ratio.
But of course the biggest cost is the generator itself, and the cost/W for generators has an EXTREME economy of scale function.. But small wind platforms cannot easily scale up to take advantage of lower cost/W generators because the other costs scale at a much faster rate than the power does.
Small wind is severely disadvantaged. Decentralized power is just not such a great goal that it’s worth sacrificing the gains from big wind.
Now, for PV solar, a case can be made for decentralization, and it’s clear that decentralized PV is beating industrial PV and concentrated solar…
But small wind never had a chance.
Excellent points. Thanks.
Wind has an advantage over solar as it can produce power at night. Unfortunately that is not usually when power is need. Wind is then at a overall disadvantage to solar. Large wind turbines can reach higher and more constant wind. Offshore there is also generally a better resource. Tethered wind generators hold the potential to reach an even better resource. But all of this tends to leave the small wind turbine like some toy manufactured in a marginal third world economy: good for that marginal economy but not as good for the buyer.
Some special markets might be served by small wind turbines that could pay a premium, like mobile military applications to charge batteries for troops. Even more efficient would be a direct mechanical power application like pumping water for a camp.
But absent these special markets improving wind turbines will always do best where the wind blows most constantly and that is not usually going to be using a small ground based wind turbine.
One way to make a small system more efficient would be to add a “lens” to focus available wind to the small turbine. Something made of fabric could keep the cost to a minimum. Small tethered wind turbines also show some promise.
Like most renewable energy, getting the most from it grows from understanding the resource as much or more than the technology. Unfortunately fossil fuels and the industrial age in general has trained us to ignore nature and focus on the technology. This works to our disadvantage when considering renewables.
As other comments have stated, the economics of small wind are generally terrible, with most such turbines running at very low capacity factors.
There are a few special cases – suppose you live on a remote off grid farm in a very windy location, a 5 to 10kw wind turbine can ease the usage of very expensive small diesel generators.
Likewise for sailing vessels, and to charge batteries for signals at road works in some locations.
In urban locations with a grid supply, forget it – a complete waste of time.
Physics is against small wind. The formula for rotational energy is a square of the radius, so the longer the blade the higher the amount of energy available. This site wont allow me to paste formulas with squares in them. That said, I have seen some promising small scale wind in the last few years. One has a vertical axis and uses vanes around the turbine to direct the wind across the blades.
For “x squared,” I use “X^2.”
Please keep up posted in that small wind innovation.
Probably for most formulae you can use FORTRAN notation. For “x cubed”, in FORTRAN it would be “x**3”.
I disagree. It depends on the local circumstances- for example in the UK there are now large numbers of successful wind turbines operating at sub 100kW, nearly all are HAWT and there are several successful models producing valuable electricity for their owners- without any problems. Of course it helps that we have high windspeeds and in many areas smooth hills rather than jagged mountains. The Feed In Tariff sparked a major revolution here and there are over 20,000 such machines in operation. There have been some spectacular failures especially in the early days, but in the last couple of years the small wind turbine market was showing successful installations increasing and respectable amounts of wind generated electricity- until we got a government which hates renewables and is working hard to stop them.
Good point. As Gary Tulie correctly observed, there a few special cases where small wind works: especially where there is no grid or a grid powered by bunker diesel that needs to be shipped in–and the wind resource is extremely favorable. It’s also true that mid-sized wind (100KW – 1MW) can work well for towns, large institutions, military bases, etc. Thanks for the comment.
In earlier times, before rural electrification, wind generators were not uncommon. They were used to charge batteries. There were appliances made to operate on the low voltages used (32 volts DC), including even electric irons and freezers, although the limited power was used mostly for lighting. The best known one was made by Jacobs in Minneapolis. They had a flyball governor to prevent them from running at destructive speeds in high winds. I think that maximum power of the largest ones was about 3KW.
Of course rural electrification killed the wind generator business. However, even now, in remote areas, windmills are still used to pump water. There is a gearbox driven by the blades. The gearbox operates a crank which reciprocates a long rod going to the pump which is directly under the windmill.
My mother, who was born in 1906, grew up without electricity; they used kerosene lights. They had a Delco plant to charge batteries, but her father wasn’t very mechanically inclined so usually it was out of order. They had a windmill to pump water into a high tank; that provided running water in the house.
Back in about 1952, my father, who was a radio pioneer and an amateur radio operator, wanted a tower for his antennae so he bought a 50′ windmill tower from a farmer and installed it in our backyard in the city. The tower was much higher than our house and for a while people would drive by to see the house with a windmill tower in the back yard. We kids, much to our parents concern for our safety, used to climb to the top of the tower for the view. Those towers had corner ladders which consisted of footholds bolted at regular intervals to the corner angle iron. Dad removed them for the first 10 feet but I learned how to use a cross brace to climb the first 10 feet then use the corner ladder to climb to the top. Actually, I could have climbed to the top without the corner ladder.
For some limited purposes, small wind power systems are still practical, but they have serious limitations.
Well, so much for nostalgia of questionable relevance.
Building on prior points, the greatest single inhibitor aside from the economics is the necessary height of the mast. In a rural area, that will not tend to be an issue, aside from the economics of the installation. In an urban area it is very close to impossible to have appropriate mast height – at a minimum 40 feet over all adjacent obstructions, and the adjacency definition is considerably different than what most people think. Just try to get a building permit for anything that is up in the air that your neighbors can see. Its a roll of the dice. And yes, this is also the economics of wind. If you don’t put it up high, the electrical generation is barely measurable, and one simply wasted money.
Yep. And so good to hear from you Arlene. You wrote one of the very first comments here seven years ago (and now there are 13,401).
Small wind was, is, and always will be useful off-grid in strong wind regimes, usually with HAWTs on reasonably tall towers above surrounding obstructions. Attempts to promote small wind in urban areas or areas served by an electricity grid were and are misguided. This post is attacking a straw man.
All wind and solar are only good up to a point. When they power flexible demand, they have some benefit. But if their total capacity cuts into baseload demand, they do more harm than good and actually become a liability.
Countries with extreme market penetrations of wind and solar – like Denmark and Germany – have already undermined the economics of baseload power. This means that nuclear power and fossil with CCS have been put at an economic disadvantage. Since without nuclear and CCS there is no hope of solving the climate crisis, wind and solar (when taken too far) indirectly become a cause of global warming, rather than a cure. Germany and Denmark will never become fossil fuel free, because their wind and solar overbuild will require fossil backup. They have driven into a cul-de-sac with no hope of ever reaching the superior carbon performance of a country like France.
Joris,
I understand your viewpoint. Wind and solar do complicate implementing nuclear but do not make it impossible.
Nuclear power plants can adjust their output to compensate for extreme changes in wind and solar power, but they have to be designed to make it possible and accept reduced nuclear fuel efficiency as one consequence. But because the cost of the nuclear fuel is a very minor portion of the cost of nuclear-generated electricity, reducing fuel efficiency is not a major problem.
Reactors themselves can be designed so that their output can be adjusted over a much greater range than is the general practice. France does that partly by inserting control rods from both the top and bottom of reactors to reduce the uneven “burning” of the fuel caused by the fuel rods. That approach can be taken even further by redesigning the control rod system. A nuclear engineer could explain that in far more detail than I can.
A way to reduce output quickly is to dump part of the steam into the condenser instead of passing it through the turbine. Of course that is inefficient, but it does work and it makes quick reductions of power possible.
Dummy loads can also be used. That’s similar to connecting huge electric heaters to absorb excess power.
Load control is another option. To a considerable degree, that can be accomplished by continually changing the consumer price of electricity according to how much power is available. For example, that would encourage designing air conditioning systems to make ice when power is plentiful and cheap and using the ice for cooling when electricity is expensive. That is already being done in some places. In the UK, some electric heaters are of the storage type; they heat rocks when electricity is cheap and use the hot rocks for space heating when electricity is expensive. The same technique has been used for many decades for domestic water heating in some places of the U.S.
Load following is inefficient and, for any kind of thermal power plant, it shortens the life of the equipment because of thermal cycling which puts mechanical stresses on the equipment. It even shortens the life of transformers. But, it can be done and is being done.
So, although adding nuclear power to a grid that uses considerable wind and solar power is challenging, it can be done although not without additional costs. As you rightly point out, it would be better to build more nuclear plants instead of adding wind and solar systems, but there are political realities which often render optimal solutions impossible.
You are correct, and I’m familiar with all the technical details. I hold an engineering MSc. title, for your information.
But I find your complacency disturbing,for two reasons.
Are you aware that environmental organisations are already in full spin, decrying the poor economics of nuclear in a grid dominated by intermittent power sources? (Just google the ‘baseload is obsolete’ nonsense)
And are you also aware that in such a grid, natural gas plants outcompete nuclear?
Theoretically, nuclear can fill the gaping supply shortfalls, but there no reason to suppose it will. There’s every reason to assume it will he fossil fuels. Let’s not pretend otherwise, even for a moment.
We simply cannot afford to take that risk. Thr need for political correctness will not be an acceptable excuse for failing to protect future generations. They will have every reason to curse us for our cowardice and subservience to deception, in my opinion.
I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to insult you, and certainly not to condescend. I agree that anti-nuclear hysteria, regardless of the source from which it’s emanating, is stupid and potentially lethal to our civilization. My point is that it’s unclear at this point the degree to which we need nuclear energy to avert global catastrophe. There are plenty of extremely bright and well-studies people who claim that a full-bore adoption of renewables and their numerous peripheral technologies like storage, transmission, efficiency, etc., is the best path to getting us out of this mess.
I love your last paragraph, btw, and I applaud your commitment to our descendants. In case it’s not obvious, I feel the same way.
A nice review of potential ways to modify any steam generating / turbine energy producing cycle to reduce output.
Here is one that looks promising, http://primowind.com/
Here is another http://dearchimedes.com/liam/
And here is a list of another in an article http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/hot-home-wind-turbines-you-can-actually-buy-plus-one-you-wish-you-could.html
Joris,
I agree that there is no good technical reason to take the risk. Unfortunately, politics being what it is, we may have no way to avoid the risk.
Ironically, the much ballyhooed Ivanpah concentrated solar system in California actually uses gas and that is not its only problem. It seems to me that the fact that the plant was actually designed to use gas is an admission that solar power is unable to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Surely if they actually expected an adequate energy storage system to be developed, they would not have provided for burning gas.
It has been pointed out that Ivanpah is able to provide power 24 hours per day because of its salt tank heat storage system. However, because it is a concentrating solar system, even a somewhat hazy day would stop it from receiving heat from the sun. Or, having a day that is cloudy for only a few hours would prevent it from storing enough heat; that is a serious problem even if it rarely occurs.
As I see it, there is no way around greatly expanding nuclear power since it is the only thing that can adequately provide for 100 percent of the power needs of most large countries. But our politicians see even mentioning nuclear power as the kiss of death for their political futures. That includes even the many politicians who do understand the need for nuclear power, and they do exist. I’m not complacent; I’m simply being realistic.
Renewables do have a rôle to play because there are remote areas, including small Pacific Island countries, where connecting to the grid would be impractical. And, of course, some places have adequate hydro power. However, those are exceptions.
Small Wind Market worth $1.89 Billion USD by 2019,at a CAGR of 19.5%
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/small-wind-market-worth-189-billion-usd-2019at-cagr-195-aniket-jadhav-1
The battlefields of small wind are littered with corpses–and at this point, no one is left standing. I can’t imagine betting that this will turn itself around.
You are correct. A question you could write a nice article about is “why did anyone believe that they would remain standing?”
Small wind is not viable. This is a question of physics and engineering that can be – and has been – answered for over a hundred years. Even before the steam engine was developed, mediaeval engineers were ditching wind energy in favour of draught animals turning racks.
The small wind industry represents small hobbyism that never had a hope. It’s fun and inspiring but not serious.
(The big wind industry is big hobbyism and also not serious but it will take a little longer before that’s become obvious too)
What makes you say that about big wind, given its impressive level of success all over the globe?
Although the question was intended for Joris, I would say that it is because wind power is intermittent and unpredictable. In fact, the amount of wind can be well below average for months at a time.
With renewable systems, except for hydro, just about every terawatt has to be backed up with a power technology that is not intermittent. Worse, the backup power cannot be left completely idle whenever it is not needed. The reason is that it cannot be brought on line instantly. If a large coal power system were left completely idle, it could take days to get it up to full power. Gas turbine systems can be brought on line much faster but if they are completely idle, it can take considerable time to bring them on line and get them up to full power. Thus, when wind and solar systems are on line, the backup systems have to be left running at reduced output (spinning reserve) to keep them ready to increase their output when the power output of renewables drops. If the backup up power uses fossil fuels, then renewables can never completely eliminate the burning of fossil fuels. Then too, spinning reserve mode is inefficient, i.e., each terawatt generated requires more fuel than if the system were running at full power.
Obviously spinning reserve mode cannot be completely eliminated since any power plant can unexpectedly fail in which case others have to increase their power to compensate. But far less spinning reserve mode operation is necessary when power is generated by reliable power plants. This also indicates that energy storage systems would benefit all power systems and not just wind and solar since storage would reduce spinning reserve mode requirements.
Of course nuclear power systems emit no CO2, but if there is enough nuclear power available to act as backup, it would have to have almost as much capacity as the renewables in which case the renewables would serve no useful purpose.
Power systems that can reliably deliver continuous power at all times have a big advantage over other power systems. And, if those power systems are nuclear, no CO2 will ever be emitted.
I expect that Joris will also comment on this and may do a better job than I have done.
While I agree that small wind is a challenged industry, there are many places where it can apply, like the Virgin Island where steady trade winds would allow wind and solar could be a sustainable solution to replacing the antiquated diesel generators that power the islands leading to occasional power outages. Though wind is variable, often when the sun is not shining the wind is blowing, so wind and solar go very well together.
This is true, but in cases like this, it’s more like mid-sized wind.
actually I had small wind in mind for each house. My Father had friends with a house in St. Thomas who he stayed with pretty often and they had problems with power outages which rendered the water pump inoperative. One solar panel and a battery solved that problem. I suggested a small windmill and more batteries so that they could have power whenever they needed it, but the outages were infrequent enough that they didn’t bother.
Would have been an interesting case study.
Wind and solar will always be viable for specialist applications.
The problem begins with trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Industrialized societies require “power on demand ” not “power on supply”.
Power distribution has always been based on large centralized generators with a distribution infrastructure designed to deliver power when needed. Coal, Natural Gas, and even oil achieve can this synergy along with most Hydro and Geo-thermal generation.
Wind and Solar are more difficult technologies. Were it not for concern the effect of undesirable emissions from fossil fuels, investment in Wind and Solar technologies would be minimal.
But it’s obvious that alternates must be found to fossil fuels. Even the least polluting, Natural Gas, has a limited era for economic viability.
It’s often predicted that energy in the future will be generated by many different technologies. While this may prove true to a certain extent, it’s a matter of debate as to what will emerge as the most economically dominant source of power generation.
IMO, the dominant generation technology emerging in the second half of the twenty-first century will be a form of miniaturized advanced nuclear. The logistics of producing electricity from Thorium far outweigh the investment costs of trying to make Solar and Wind work.
It may be possible to improve secondary technology such as storage, greater efficiency, even cost, to overcome the problems of Wind and Solar’s intermittent nature, but the question must be asked, “Why bother?”. Why bother when a more efficient, more economic, zero emission competitor is available ?
Setting aside all emotional prejudice, development by the Japanese of safe, efficient, miniaturized thorium generators capable of being located underground in high usage areas,(thus limiting distribution costs/losses and reducing land area, will prove too competitive for other technologies, except in specialist applications.
The evolutionary process of development should not be hurried by ideology or precipitate political action. The process should allow incremental innovation. Just as the early steam vessels took the best part of a century to slowly replace sailing technology (which peaked as late as the early twentieth century), so will the development of alternate energy generation continue to improve.
Backing one horse now and calling all others hearsay, would be as foolish as betting on paddle technology in 1854 and forbidding rivals.
Eventually, the market will decide. Those nations which invest in inflexible power generation technology, will find themselves noncompetitive and will either change, or suffer the consequences.
Wind is almost exactly 5% of the enter U.S. grid-mix, currently running at 5.4 TW, and it’s over 42% in Denmark. http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/denmark-sets-world-record-wind-power.html
If it’s correct to say that this is a “specialist application,” we’re talking about an extremely large “specialty.”
Small wind fails because the owners site the turbine where they want the power, at their homes. Large wind works because the owners site the turbine where the wind is.