A big wind farm
March 20th, 2012 at 4:55 pm by David FarrarIdiot/Savant blogs at No Right Turn:
Genesis Energy has been granted resource consent for its proposed Castle Hill wind farm. At a potential 858 MW, Castle Hill would be the biggest wind farm in the country, and our second-largest power station; if constructed, it would double our total wind generation in one hit, and put us 5% closer to our “90% renewables by 2030″ target.
This is a good thing. At present, wind is not as cheap as other forms of power, but it is an important part of our future as it is renewable. You can never rely on wind alone, due to the need for security of supply. But I think it is great to be making more use of wind for power, rather than finite resources.
Related posts:
- Makara Wind Farm
- Wind farm declined due to spiritual values
- Wind powered Wellington
- A wind powered Wellington
March 20th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Better dump those genesis shares quick smart.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Percentage of power supplied to the world by wind.. to the nearest whole number.. 0%.
JC
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
These things are dreadful I much prefer a dam which can be a wonderful recreational facility. Went to Karapiro the other day. What a wonderful recreational facility for people. As for white water people they are cheapskate backpackers who never want to pay for anything.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Watch as people descend from the hills, condemning this scheme to extract electricity from fresh air and demanding that it be stopped.
We want electricity in our homes, but you’re not allowed to make it, anywhere!
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
More often than not West Wind (the factory above Makara) is not operational. Wind is the biggest scam there is and I am amazed intelligent folks keep banging on about it.
It is not pat of out future unless our future includes power cuts and surges.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:18 pm
Well, if unsubsidized (and also unsubsidized by the consumer) and it generates enough power to justify the installation cost, then why not. When generating it will save water somewhere in the hydro system, provided that that system can of course save that water and not need to spill it anyway.
Note though (as you do point out David), it is not “base load” and does mean that additional money will still need to be spent to maintain NZ’s total baseload capacity at some point.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
CHFR –
We’ll you’d better ring up the technical people at Meridian (I think West Wind was Meridian…?) and explain to them that they’re doing it all wrong!
I am sure they are all incompetent idiots and would benefit greatly from a dose of your no-nonsense, commonsense view of things
Tell that to the people complaining about the noise!! Two equal and opposite grizzles might even cancel one another out?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Cue the psychosomatic loons protesting the imaginary effects of windmills on their wellbeing…
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Anybody know what average % (say over one year) of “potential” power generation capability wind farms in NZ have now? Any projections as to what this one will achieve?
At what stage will Genesis build the 858 MW generation capability that will be required as the usual contingency for these types of volatile power supplies? That’s in order to match the steadily increasing baseload demands.
What form will this backup capability take? I presume it will be something that can be spun up quickly during periods of low or no winds and can reliably stay up for several days and then tick over quietly in the background until needed once more. Something like a gas-fired plant I would think.
Perhaps most important of all: has anybody calculated the total carbon loading of the wind and baseload capability?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
No, this is a shit thing. Wind farms are plain ridiculous.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Tom Hunter –
As I understand it, supply of wind to drive turbines is no problem in New Zealand. The issue is more that you don’t want to have more than some %age (IIRC it is something like 25%) of your grid powered by wind or you start to have problems with instability…
But until you hit that percentage, building new wind generation is no problem at all…
(Hopefully somebody in power engineering will be along to correct this shortly…?)
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Wind would probably be a better energy source if battery storage systems were more effective. There are of course rumours that batteries invented some years ago could store huge amounts of electrical energy, were much less bulky and charged a great deal faster then those used today. Of course these inventions / patents have been brought up or suppressed by big oil. Time will tell.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Great. Like to see more focus on geothermal though.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:32 pm
RRM
Yes, that’s another issue from a power network perspective and I’m sure we’re nowhere near that.
I was thinking more in terms of the individual plant actual vs. “potential”.
Bring on Thorium reactors – and my personal favourite that I want powering my district.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Wind farms are a blot on the landscape, are noise pollutants, and are very inefficient – no wonder the price of our electricity has skyrocketed over the past decade, to subsidise all these expensive forms of power generation.
New CO2 technology is coming on line in the next decade to provide power generation – wait and see.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
The death toll at Fukushima was 0, regardless of the mass international hysteria which included Kiwis in Japan who were no where near Fukushima appearing on the news demanding that the NZ government evacuate them.
The death toll at Makara wind farm last year was 1. People just won’t stand for this sort of carnage!!! Until wind power can be proved to be 100 percent safe then it shouldn’t be allowed in NZ. Also, wind farms need to be treated as an industrial facility. In Germany, which is a country with all sorts of eccentric ideas about electricity, blades from disintegrating wind turbines have been known to fly up to 400m and are the size of aircraft wings. Makara should be fenced off with lots of warning notices and guards with dogs, but instead people can just walk past these killing machines.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:00 pm
This wind farm will never happen, just like project Haze. Every mad tin foil wearing fruit cake will object along with a host of minor celebraties, ex-All blacks, self described artists and god knows who else along with the usual NIMBY army. They may as well have annouced they are going to generate power by harvesting whales for their bubber.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Wind farms only look green – the inconvenient pollution is elsewhere.
Vote:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
March 20th, 2012 at 6:22 pm
^^^ What a ridiculously twisted article. You know what ELSE also uses permanent magnet material? EVERY OTHER kind of electric generator or motor.
It’s the electrical energy infrastucture of the entire world that’s the market for those factories, not just Al Gore and the wind turbine “movement”
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:23 pm
“I think it is great to be making more use of wind for power, rather than finite resources.”
Even when there are many centuries of that finite resource?
Madness.
Natural gas prices have plummeted. We should all have access to cheap and plentiful energy rather than being forced into fuel poverty by the zealots.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:24 pm
@tom hunter – this is capacity factor, and the equation you need is total annual generation in GWh / (generating capacity in MW * 8.766). So for 2010 year – 1618 GWh / (539 MW * 8.766) = 34.25% capacity factor, which is high by international standards. Hydro is around 60-80% and geothermal is 90% (no power station is going to do 100%).
And wind complements hydro – when the wind blows, you can throttle down the hydro plants to minimum output and save the water in the lakes for peak times and calm periods.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Yep, great news, DPF. This will help reduce our dependence on environmentally destructive fossil fuels for energy generation, and take the wind out of the sails of the “drill, baby, drill” brigade.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Shhh RRM! The Anemoi Priesthood frown upon any public mention of the Movement!
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
@cows4me and tom hunter, we have the biggest storage systems in the world in the form of massive hydro lakes. Wind power will work well with them as a buffer, up to around 18% of system capacity, then you have to start building additional gas turbine generators to pick up the slack when the wind isn’t blowing (link).
Currently wind is generating around 4% of our electricity. You can see how much is being generated live on http://www.em6live.com
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Parliament?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:31 pm
@RRM and slade52 actually I believe the majority of that magnetic material goes into computer hard disks at the moment!
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 6:38 pm
David, you’ve been spending too much time on Waiheke Island. First your blooper on Obama and his appalling energy policy and now you think demonstrably foolish, uneconomic, unproductive wind farms are a good thing?
What price do you reckon you’ll get for your second hand Prius in five years time?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 7:06 pm
How do we ‘dump’ those shares wreck1080?
Genesis is not a listed company. It’s an SOE.
Doh
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 7:12 pm
The recent report from Prof Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University (http://thegwpf.org/gwpf-reports.html) presented a case that Wind energy in the UK is 10 times as expensive than the equivalent gas generation and produces more net CO2 emissions than pure gas alone (because of the inefficient use of gas standby generators to supply the backup for wind).
This may well not apply in NZ because we have a large hydro baseload capabilty, but the suggestion seems to be that the wind bubble is about to burst in the UK and the rest of Europe (Germany is already ramping up its coal generation to offset the nuclear phase-out).
Since wind requires a relatively large capital investment and a long time to ROI, then there might be some investors who will pull out of wind in NZ for this reason
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Wind farms are being abandoned and left to rust all over the planet. They are a non self sustaining joke to everyone but Greenies.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 7:49 pm
lcmortensen and dc
Thanks for the info. I figured our capacity factor would be better than most countries of the world, given that we are a fairly narrow couple of islands running North-South in the middle of the ocean, but good to see an actual figure. Obviously we’re in a better situation than other parts of the world such as Europe.
But I was not too impressed by that article’s starting assumptions given the contradiction between:
and
I suppose they had their reasons for excluding these factors but given that those will be real costs that have to be accounted for it seems a little silly.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 8:02 pm
The biggest travesty, were this plan to go ahead, is that NZ has such abundant hydro & geo thermal potential, that it renders these noisy, ugly monstrosities called ‘windfarms’ completely unnecessary.
Yet this potential remains largely untapped because a bunch of recreational kayakers feel it of utmost importance to be able to paddle down a river twice a year (rather than on a beautiful bluewater lake), or because some type of purple spotted tree snail happens to be living along the embankment.
In terms of detrimental environmental impact, hydro and geothermal come nowhere within cooee of windfarms.
Let’s hope politicians come to their senses quickly before blind idealism books it’s largest victory yet over pragmatism.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Seems a perfectly sane comment to make to me David, ignore the blog tantrum above. It baffles me why certain individuals feel the need to rant about things like energy generation from a position of absolutely no experience. Wind power is a wonderful resource, which can be used to generate not only electricity, but good old fashioned cash money. It’s a backward, ideologically obsessed anti-greenie position to hold that only coal, or oil, are the only viable options for power generation. For those of you with haphazard figures, pulled from your own posteriors, here are some easily checkable figures taken from wikepdia on wind power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
“The total amount of available power from the wind is considerably more than present human power use from all sources. At the end of 2011, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 238 gigawatts (GW), growing by 41 GW over the preceding year. Wind power now (2010 data) has the capacity to generate 430 TWh annually, which is about 2.5% of worldwide electricity usage. Over the past five years (2010 data) the average annual growth in new installations has been 27.6 percent. Wind power market penetration is expected to reach 3.35 percent by 2013 and 8 percent by 2018. Several countries have already achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration, such as 21% of stationary electricity production in Denmark, 18% in Portugal,16% in Spain, 14% in Ireland and 9% in Germany in 2010. As of 2011, 83 countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis.”
And before some moron decides this is just greenie talk, it’s worth me telling you that I’m 100% pro nuclear power, in NZ. The human race is currently suffering a massive energy crisis. We need to consider ALL options available to us when it comes down to power generation. It would help us a lot if we cut back drastically on fossil fuel dependance as that is a dead end road, if only economically.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 8:30 pm
One more point, hydro power is far from benign. Do some research before you spout your opinions
http://debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index.php/Debate:_Hydroelectric_dams
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 8:37 pm
Not a fan (pardon the pun) of wind turbines. Geothermal would make more sense.
>The death toll at Fukushima was 0, regardless of the mass international hysteria which included Kiwis in Japan who were no where near Fukushima appearing on the news demanding that the NZ government evacuate them.
20km exclusion zone for a year and counting, with all those people inside it losing their jobs and homes.
So not the ‘nothing to see here folks’ situation some seem to think it is.
Not convinced nuclear power stations and countries prone to earthquakes mix all that happily.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/6296746/Fukushima-silence-Inside-Japans-ghost-towns
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 8:50 pm
As one of the few or the only poster on here with real experience of alternative energy Its pretty obvious that the more options for supply source that you have the more reliable you energy becomes.
Vote:We have had drought in the past that has servilely affected our hydro resources having some wind power along with carbon based supply gives us more flexibility to guaranty supply no matter wot crisis’s develop in the future
March 20th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
GConnell +1
I would also be interested to see what opportunities there are for offshore wind farms, perhaps in conjunction with ocean current turbines (there was to be a trial of similar technology in Kaipara harbour, but the local NIMBYs scotched the idea).
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 9:07 pm
Right, so the Castle Hill Resort failed, the Castle Hill Skifield failed, but there are still great government subsidies for uneconomic windfarms, whoopee!!!
Typical NZ, just as the rest of the world wake up to the crap about expensive noisy heavy metal intensive and uneconomic wind generation, we double down. Windmills are ugly and destroy birds, but apparently are less evil this week than dams. Shame snails can’t fly is all I can say.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
I love the arguments for and against wind farms. Always 100% sure of their position…. one of them must be wrong.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
…meant to say ‘Not convinced nuclear power stations and countries prone to earthquakes/tsunamis mix all that happily.’
Other concerns from nuclear being massive start-up/decomissioning costs, and what you do with the waste.
There haven’t been many disasters, but when there is one, the effects are huge.
Economic cost of Chernobyl still ongoing.
One ‘little’ radiation cloud and bye bye dairy and sheep exports.
>there are still great government subsidies for uneconomic windfarms
Which is daft. But I’m pretty sure governments can end up with the decommissioning bills for nuclear plants even when they are privately owned.
>Wind farms are a blot on the landscape,
Purely out of curiousity. How many people who think that are in favour of new mines being opened up?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 9:40 pm
@GConnell
The manner of your argumentation alone makes me 99% sure that you’re either a greenie, or at the very least a hard-core lefty.
First off you attempt to dismiss posts that do not conform with your own beliefs and ideas as ‘tantrums’….pretty childish stuff really.
Then, trying to paint yourself as a figure of authority, you complain the people ‘ranting’ here have no experience, without including any of your own credentials that supposedly would suggest you don’t fall in the same category.
This of course puts to the side the fact that one need not necessarily require experience in the electricity sector in order to form an opinion on the matter.
You go on to imply that the people who are not in favour of this windfarm are backward and only hold oil and coal as viable alternatives which, just by reading some of the other posts above, one would know is complete nonsense.
This is followed by a stack of statistics, of which it is rather unclear what point these are supposed to illustrate. If it was to demonstrate what an incredible impact wind energy has had on total electricity generation, one could very easily use the same statistics to argue the exact opposite.
No…being pro-nuclear does not automatically exempt you from being a greenie. Plenty of other greenies have already trodden the same ground you’re now standing on.
I don’t see anyone arguing that we shouldn’t cut our dependance on fossil fuels. Did you enjoy beating that strawman?
Finally…I don’t see anyone claiming that hydro is completely benign either…myself included.
Chosing forms of electricity generation is always a matter of weighing off pros and cons.
It’s obvious to anyone reading the opinion I ‘spouted’ above, that I consider hydro electricity to come out on top when being evaluated against windfarms.
I’m sure others will have a different opinion, and I make a personal commitment not to descend into the gutter and accuse them of throwing a tantrum, should they wish to express that opinion here on this forum..;)
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Once Genesis is privatised it is likely that this will be the last new electricity generation capacity to be developed for some time.
Privatised Contact Energy has a delivered negative capacity over the last decade as it has decommisioned more that it has built. Once all of our Electricity companies are privatised they will all go down the same path of reducing capacity, price gouging the consumers, predatory behaviour against their competitors, market cornering and all that good free market practice that happens in the US which will essentially destabilise economy in the long term.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:18 pm
But I think it is great to be making more use of wind for power, rather than finite resources.
But David, there is no distinction between scarce resource being consumed in producing energy, or scarce resources being consumed in capturing it – either way scarce resources are spent.
And if you add up the scarce resources consumed to get a KwH from wind you get a bigger number than you do from natural gas or coal or nuclear.
Even if the wind blows at no cost, if you have to spend $10 to get useful energy out of it, then the world was just deprived of $10 worth of things that those scarce resources could have been alternatively used to produce.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Start up green energy companies that have received $30 billion dollars of funding from Steven Chu and the DOE since 2008 and have gone into bankruptcy:
Beacon Power
Evergreen Solar
Spectrawatt
Eastern Energy
Solyndra
Companies that have undertaken massive layoffs:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Fisker Automotive
Abound Energy
12 further companies are facing severe financial issues
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Wow, I’m always amazed by the number of people who slam all wind-farms as uneconomic. A well sited wind-farm in NZ can produce a very healthy return. (BTW NZ’s wind resource is one of the best in the world so overseas analysis is largely invalid here)
Private companies would not be pursuing Wind Power if the business cases did not stack up. (also note that there are no wind farm subsidies other than carbon credits in NZ)
The unreliability of wind power presents few problems to gird stability until wind starts making up around 15-20% of our capacity. Remember every power station needs to be backed up by spinning reserve, in case it faults and trips offline, not just wind.
The main problem with wind power is the relatively short life-span of the hardware. Expect to get about 20 years out of a windmill, as opposed to 80+ years for a hydro dam. Of course wind farms are relatively cheap and fast to install.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:26 pm
GConnell – you could hardly be less convincing if you tried. Your quote from wiki merely demonstrates that if governments throw enough subsidies at any given thing, even expensive, useless projects such as wind energy, then it will be built. And what the untapped world potential for wind power has to do with anything is known only to you. Fossil fuels may eventually be a dead end, but that end is now thousands of years away thanks to our new found ability to tap shale. The virtually limitless capacity of low cost energy to improve lives should not be discarded lightly.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:30 pm
Scott B – I am happy to be proved wrong on cost per kwh of wind versus alternatives in NZ. If wind really is getting built on a commercial basis in NZ, which it is not in Europe, US etc, then all to the good. Can you provide a link or cite showing this?
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:39 pm
It is unlikely Genesis will build this anytime soon. So it being granted resource consent is really only academic. However If Toad and his “green” army want to finance the construction of large windfarms then I welcome him to try. Just do not ask for other people’s money to build your project.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Wind power = waste. of. money & rusting relics
Broken Down And Rusting: Is This The Future Of Britain’s ‘Wind Rush’?
That last statement about sums it up.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Oh dear – what a shame. Wind is slowly but surely being shown up as a waste of time – for several reasons.
1. It has to be backed up by another form of generation – and the more wind generation there is the more critical is the bcak up. The back up has to be carbon based.
Vote:2. Windmills are starting to fall to bits. Static electrical discharges are ruining the bearings (and they are big – like a metre in diameter – and a little tricky to replace a hundred feet in the air..)
3. China is putting the brakes on rare earth supplies – theyve recently halved the exports and will decrease them even further.
4. In most countries they require subsidising to survive.
5. And operators are just walking away from old/broken/inefficient ones – like the one above karori in wellington – which hasnt operated for years. Guess who will pay to clean them up ………….(you only get one guess since the answer is so easy)
March 20th, 2012 at 11:21 pm
So many I’ll informed people on all sides. First things first, castle hill is the one genesis announced they are not planning to build any time soon because the demand is not there. If its not there now, in five years time ther is unlikely to be demand for 800mw which is huge in the nz context. There are a bunch of other power stations on other powerco books at various stages of consent as well so consent is not always indicative of likely construction, such as contact’s farm in raglan which has the big advantage of being close to high capacity grid lines and close to auckland. Castle hill faces some challenges connecting it to the grid as wairarapa is not well endowed with grid capacity.
Hydro in nz is not as great as many would like to think. Reserves are quite limited – only six to 8 weeks – as the lakes tend to be long and shallow or constrained takeoff due to rma consents. Many plants are run of river so don’t have much in the way of reserve storage. Compare that to norways six To 8 months. To say that wind complements hydro is highly simplistic and ignores things like the above and grid constraints which mean that you can’t just switch off hydro and automatically replace it with wind.
Wind does Impose costs on the system but then so does any new plant. It can be managed at quite high levels but the key issue is having the systems that can manage any voltage drop due to high wind penetration and enough fast spinning reserve (note to Scott not every station needs spinning reserve, you just need enough to replace the largest single unit on the grid). The more diverse your wind resource the better but that has implications for even larger grid investment and we are already spending a lot on that. But Nz is about the only country where wind is being installed without subsidy ie It is judged as economic in its own right. That tells you how relatively good the resource is and how big the opportunities.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 11:41 pm
You blimmin’ well can tonight, let me tell you!! There’ll be some carnage around in the morning, hopefully not my roof!
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 11:45 pm
This sounds like arguments my mother used to start about her water rates: it falls from the sky.
Here’s a relevant argument from a 2004 paper (PDF only) presented by the Rt Hon Simon Upton, with whom I have plenty of disagreements but who cannot be denied as someone who is both smart and “green” (though not Green enough I’m sure):
I’ve highlighted the key points for those with problems seeing out of their posteriors.
As far as the rest of the statements are concerned:
And the costs to get to this “capacity”, which windpower never comes close to achieving on a baseload basis, have been fantastic, but more on that later.
Sure – when driven by subsidies and Euro-mania over AGW during a very good economic period. Now? Not so much:
Awwww
Key word – “expected”. Here’s a key acronym and another key word: “GFC” and “broke”. Then there are non-financial problems:
I especially liked the bit where they have to use diesel engines to keep the blades spinning during windless times. I’m glad you approve of nuclear power because if German power prices keep going up as they have, those reactors may get fired up again. Either that or they’ll have to boost purchases of electricity from nuclear-powered France if they’re to meet their CO2 reduction targets.
I’d be a little careful with those figures if I was you. They mix “installed capacity” with “production” when talking about the same numbers, and based on the usual conversations about windpower I’d bet the figures are the former. So the percentage figures of actual proportions of electricity generation will be much lower than those claimed on the basis of installed capacity.
And again I wonder what the real costs are. The problems faced by German power consumers are hardly unique, as this recent British report showed:
I’m sure one could fight about the numbers, but no amount of arguing will close the gap between £120 billion and £13 billion.
Now all this is not to say that windpower cannot work better here in NZ than it has overseas, given our unique characteristics of hydro lake buffers (narrow though they are) and ability to keep wind farms mainly land based. But it’s clearly not the fantasy solution a lot of people imagine it is when you look at it in its entirety.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 11:50 pm
Barry, I don’t know where you live but there isn’t any old/broken/inefficient turbines above Karori. The only old turbine in Wgtn is the Brooklyn Hill one and last time I looked (yesterday) it was working.
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 11:54 pm
@ dazza
They are probably feathering the turbines tonight. There is such a thing as too much wind
Vote:March 20th, 2012 at 11:56 pm
My roof insider…..not the bloody turbines.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:00 am
Tom Hunter
Brilliant analysis. My business partner in NZ and I own the licensing rights to two green technologies for Australia and New Zealand. The technology company is headquartered in AZ and the inventor is a hard core greenie. The stark reality for wind and solar generators here in the US is that utility companies, if not mandated by their State of domicile (eg California) to HAVE to purchase energy from these so-called green sources, offer about 1/3rd the normal per kwh for any energy that is delivered intermittently. Power companies have to be able to deliver power to their customers or they would go out of business. Brown outs and black outs common in the 3rd world are not an option. They look at their bedrock power generation load, they fastidiously plot precisely their seasons of peak demand (winter for cold climes – summer for the sun belt) and look at patterns of growth in population and industry in their catchement area and then they generate themselves or buy from third party generators the power they need to meet the base demand plus peaks. They have a ratio of power they acquire from guaranteed power delivery sources (such as nuclear, oil, gas,coal or HEP) vs intermittent sources (solar, wind and tidal) and pay accordingly. To someone who can give them power 24/7 as and when they need it the local utilities in my state pay anything from 15 – 23c per kwh, to the intermittent power suppliers they pay only 5 -7c. You can’t make enough profit from that revenue to ever pay back the capital cost of construction without the government subsidising he construction and/or mandating the purchase of the green power. The aborted US Cap and Trade legislation and the various regulatory pronouncements of the EPA are designed to drive coal and oil powered stations out of business or fining the producers both driving up the price of electricity thus making alternative energy seem more affordable.
It was a recipe doomed to failure. The tree hugging inventor of our green technologies and the entreprenuers who have funded the commercialisation of his inventions have long realised this and have devised technologies that are truly green while at the same time are very profitable without the whiff of any government money or legislative thumb on the scales.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:58 am
Bluedevil — you are quite right – that thing is above Brooklyn.
But dont get too excited about seeing the thing rotating……..
A couple of years ago I took the family to Wellington to have a look at parliament and Government house etc. Important to see where the place is run from I thought. We went up to the turbine as part of the trip.
The trubine wasnt working because it had broken down. The owners however had a problem. They knew that it wasnt worth repairing it – and it was less than 20 years old. But how could they abandon the thing due to the economics and then go and apply for a wind farm consent – that wasnt going to be a good look.
(up to this point I was aware of – i wasnt aware of what happend since then so Ive done a bit of checking)
The owners used a well known ruse – ask the people pf Wellington if they want to keep the turbine up on the hill – sounds oh so noble doesnt it – and with any luck theyd say no……..
Unfortunately the people of wellington didnt know about the economics of wind energy and they all said “YES – keep it”
Vote:No doubt in the offices of the owners could be heard dark mutterings about the cost involved and the stupidity of the people of Wellington, but they gone down this track and had to follow thru.
So they had to fix it – but what we dont know is who really paid for the fix – the owners or the Wellington City Council or the Government or who. One thing is for sure – the cost wasnt worth it.
March 21st, 2012 at 9:15 am
The key thing with these figures thrown around about wind power generation is the the installed generation capacity figure is USELESS. The very best farms overseas get 25-30% of the installed capacity over time. Most are significantly LESS. So quoting figures from Wikipedia is a waste of time ( they were probably “adjusted” by William Connelly anyhow).
Vote:The Danes pay very heavily for their Govts “investmennt” in wind farms because demand is relatively low when the wind blows and high when it is not. They sell surplus to their neighbours cheap who slow down their own hydro stations and then in the winter the Danes have to buy back their short fall at much higher prices. So I’m sure the Danish consumer is “happy”. Also they have now found the foundations of their offshore installations are starting to deteriorate.
As others have said wind farms overseas survive mainly due to subsidies.
Having said that wind farms in NZ should work with our hydro as base load but I have not seen any figures to show my power bill is not subsidizing the farms.
March 21st, 2012 at 9:38 am
NZ’s supply of electricity is already 90% renewable, David. 80% hydro, 10% geothermal & 10% gas powered.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 11:10 am
I think you will find it’s 74% renewable in NZ
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Only some years. Most of the 2000s it was in the mid 60s
@barry
Meridian own the Brooklyn turbine so they paid
@ Ross
Wind power is offered into the market at 0.01c per MW. They get paid what the rest of the market clears at. The marginal generator that sets the price is usually coal or gas.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Actually we are both wrong Lance, acording to this article it’s 77%. Still pretty good by world standards. As long as we have an affordable & abundant supply. http://english.cri.cn/6826/2012/03/20/191s687992.htm
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 2:16 pm
If we lived in a benevolent dictatorship we would have a nuclear reactor in Northland (a place with v. low seismic risk, and v. low volcanic risk) that supplied Auckland with cheap power, leaving hydro and Geothermal to power the rest of NZ, with a bit of natural gas topping things up.
But since we live in a democracy we are stuck with Nimbys, Greenies, Anti-Capitalists, Anti-Development people manipulating and dictating to us instead.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 2:48 pm
@ max
We don’t have the capability to deal with a relatively minor oil spill. There would need to be significant improvements in nuclear technology before we have the need or capability to manage an operational power plant. Nuclear physics is highly specialised and we are a very small country. I’m not sure we could manage the personnel numbers.
To make it cost effective it would have to be a very large plant. The problem with that is the bigger it is the bigger the reserve generation you’d have to build as well because the system needs to be backed up. And nuclear plants tend to have lengthy down times when they have a problem, so you are going to significantly increase generation costs overall because someone has to pay for all those power plants that will be sitting idle in case of breakdown.
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