Small wonder Britain is nearly bankrupt;
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
[…]
The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.
Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.
…’cause that ain’t how they do things in Texas!
During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.
Infrequently, a power plant might choose to bid below the short term marginal price in order to stay in the market and avoid shutting down. It can be economically rational for operators of less responsive generation units to offer negative prices in order for it to avoid the costs of shutting down for just a few hours and then start up again when load increases – think coal-fueled or natural gas steam turbine. When energy load is very low, near zero or negative prices can result.
This isn’t the cast in West Texas. Instead, the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation. Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.
The world is being run by crazy people.
h/t Larry
Maybe I need to put in a proposal for a 100 gigawatt wind-farm, then never build it.
Then I can sell the electricity I didn’t produce to the grid which doesn’t want it. Let me see: 100 GW = 100,000 MW at 180$ per MWH = about 20 Million $/Hr. Not quite Al Gore’s range, but still a nice chunk of change.
Bonus: not building the wind-farm will earn me Co2 credits as the concrete and steel, production effort, etc wasn’t needed. After all, not using Co2 is the same as conserving/reducing Co2.
So, I just need to save these credits until they are worth somethin (C’mon Al, scare those prices up).
See, it’s not hard to make money – just need to think like the Goracle.
This is old school.
Union employees have been getting paid not to work for decades. Some civic ‘workers’ make turning off a turbine to earn a few grand seem laborious.
I just turned off the bathroom light. McGuinty’s going to send me $100!!!
Once again some schlep writes a poorly worded law (at a politician’s request) intended to “help” a fledgling industry and corporate bean counters find the loophole. This isn’t the only time this has happened and probably won’t be the last.
I recall somewhere there are tons of butter and milk products stored because the government guaranteed a market for Wisconsin dairy farmers and the industrious buggers actually increased output. I think they then paid the farmers to cull their herds. I’ll have to look it up to be sure but there are lots of “stuff” like that when the government tries to help.
Denmark was the world leader in installed wind capacity….now it’s Germany.
Denmark used/uses in practical terms NO WIND POWER. Denmark sell power to Norway and Sweden in return for power returned.
Norway and Sweden use a combination of Nuclear base-load and Hydro-electric peak load. The limiting factor of Hydro is water….wind power from Denmark allows conservation of water in the reservoirs.
Germany has cancelled further wind installations because wind requires equivalent capacity from fast response Natural Gas generators maintained at fast spin (high idle).
Bonneville Power in the US North West uses wind to conserve water in it’s resrvoirs….like Norwway and Sweden…
All this is the result of wind being expensive, unreliable, unpredictable and intermitant.
All this was established by the installations in the Altamount Pass of California 30 years past….we knew…but then a cabel of politicians watched a sci-fi movie…..
This is the stuff of Obamugabe’s vision for America’s future. Another reason to replace all Ivy league universities with library cards. Forget Communism, welcome to Green Hell.
If you live in Ontario, you see the same type of madness. McGuinty buys wind power at $0.80/kWh, and then sells it to consumers at 6-10 cents per kWh.
That lucrative price for wind has caused a rush in investment. One company borrowed $194 million to build 9 wind farms, with a total rated capacity of 90 MW. The total cost of the project is $255 million. Of course, as we all know, the probability of 24 hour output is zero; even reaching peak output is problematic.
At $2.8 million per MW, the wind farm seems like a bargain compared to Darlington nuclear’s cost of $4 millon per MW. But since wind farms only generate 30% of their maximum capacity, you have to multiply that number by 3.3, to get an adjusted figure of $9.3 million. And we’ll be paying for that for years. That’s some really astute people we have running things.
Saying excess windmill electrical energy can’t be stored isn’t exactly correct. It can be used to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water when not needed online providing such obvious purposes were considered during the proposal phase.
This would have had the additional benefit of wearing out the windmills post haste and then junking them as soon as possible while leaving the enviro-boobs and rent seekers who were their champions holding the bag.
The correct information on Ontario is:
Wind power has a $0.145 / kwh ($145 / MWH) rate
Solar Power has a $0.80 /kwh ($800 / MWH ) rate
For more information just google “Wind Concerns Ontario”. There is lots of information.
If you want to see how dismal; the performance is read “Watts with the Wind” — on the front page or in the viability section.
Also on the Front page:
“Dalton McGuinty has directed the Ontario Provincial Police Force to investigate members of Wind Concerns Ontario and, if necessary, visit our homes. They refer to us as resisters.”
Read and enjoy!
WillR:
Thanks for the link to “Watts Up With Wind”; it substantiated what I felt in my gut.
One thing, though. The only reference to price was “especially if we are paying $1.7M per MW”. Since he didn’t write MWH – and he appeared pretty scrupulous about using the terms correctly – is this a subsidy we’re paying to people who install turbines? If that’s the case, we’re really blowing our brains out.
If it isn’t one con. Its another in the wings, or running under sight.
With government backing how can you keep track anymore?
http: //www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html
Great website…TEDtalks.com
Sorry, TED.com
A while back I read (in a power engineering journal) an interesting proposal for dealing with excess wind generation: storing compressed air on-site at conventionally fueled power plants. The air is stored at off-peak times then used during peak demand time (like a turbo-charger on a car) to increase the efficiency of the combustion turbine. This arrangement can boost the energy efficiency from 15 to 25 percent.