The UK Has Its Own Opponents to Renewable Energy
Here in the U.S., we have climate change deniers, and all manner of other opponents to renewable energy. In essence, they’re the oil and coal companies, the members of Congress they influence, and those who believe the enormous amount of propaganda they generate on “clean coal,” “safe nuclear,” etc.
In the U.K. however, they come in the form of certain members of the nobility. According to The Guardian, the Duke of Edinburgh has made a fierce attack on wind farms, claiming that “they don’t work,” and describing them as “a disgrace” and “absolutely useless.” Pictured here, however, he looks rather jolly. Who would know that such scathing (and foolish) statements lie behind such a winsome smile and excellent breeding?
Fortunately, some Brits who were born without such privilege, i.e., mainstream scientists, don’t see it that way. For example, Professor Jim Skea, research director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), responds to the Duke:
On the “they don’t work” issue, it’s quite clear that they do generate electricity. If you look at the machinery they are getting nearly 30% compared to their peak capacity [the load factor]. There is a limited degree of predictability about the wind so they do need to be backed up. But not as much as people think because the law of statistics means that the wind is likely to be blowing somewhere.
The UK has one of the best wind resources in Europe. Far better than Germany. Going off-shore the wind resource is even better – with load factors up to 40%. If you are going to capture energy from wind it’s as good as you’re going to get. It’s just a question of whether you think it’s worth it. We as researchers say this is the best guess of the costs; it is a political choice whether you want to pay for it.
Wind-farms are being subsidised. For onshore wind, subsidies are going down compared with the cost of gas which is going up. If you include the carbon costs, in the future you can see a point where there is parity between non-renewable and wind energy. Perhaps 2020.
“the law of statistics means that the wind is likely to be blowing somewhere”
Unfortunately the law of statistics also means that the wind is not guaranteed to be always blowing somewhere, as happened in December 2010 in the UK when it hardly blew anywhere for a fortnight. This is when you need some serious storage capacity, several TWh worth if you are to get most of your electricity from solar and wind. (for reference the average UK electricity usage is about 1 TW)
Don’t get me wrong I’m not anti-wind, but we do need to be pragmatic, not a naysayer but also not over optimistic. To balance out these we will need very substantial energy storage and the only technology that can sensibly and economically store these quantities of energy are chemical fuels, idealy synthetic hydrocarbons.
So I have to ask, if the wind didn’t blow for a fortnight, was it sunny at all? I agree with having ample storage and that is a challange. I have both solar and a small wind turbine. Some days I get one or the other, some days I get both and some days I get little of either. On the days where I get both I run around like an idiot trying to find ways to use all of that power. Sometimes I do that even when I get lots of only one or the other. What would be a great advantage would be a dumpload that I could feed a variable amount of energy to. Something that would take the excess I generate whether a little or a lot and turn it into something useful. A hydrogen generator would be great for this and I have one mostly designed and fairly complete but do not often have a need to dump that kind of power. The other problem is storage. I could pump it into tanks to use later to run a generator but that takes energy and is a fairly large storage container. Turning it into a liquid fuel, as you suggest, would be the most dense in terms of storage. I believe this is what Mr. Doty is working on.