24 Replies to “How long can 45 wind farms produce 1 megawatt?”

  1. So what happens to those thousands of batteries costing billions of dollars when it gets really cold? What makes one think that they will react any differently than a frozen Tesla? How much more energy will be required to keep them warm so that they can provide their full capacity or to even allow them the accept a recharge? The same questions arise for the heat of summer. Hot batteries don’t work as well and they must be cooled.
    Large scale batteries on grid wide basis is a bottomless money pit in which to waste time, efforts and money for little return.

    2. Charging current lithium batteries is an endothermic reaction, thus at certain temperatures, that can be found in Alberta, you cannot put enough heat into the batteries to charge them, as some tesla owners are finding out.

  2. “Just build reliable, baseload power, with peaking capacity. And end this foolishness.”

    This is the only way to provide reliable, affordable electricity. This is not a theoretical concept, it is the way electricity companies have produced power for decades. It was such a successful model that most people never even had to think or worry about electricity reliability and affordability. But admitting to being mistaken about renewable power vs. traditional power seems to be impossible for the political and chattering class.

    Whatever people’s opinions are about CO2 and climate change, I think there needs to be a discussion that food production, home heating and electricity should be completely exempt from carbon taxes. These are not luxury items, they are basic necessities of life.

      1. Yes. Isn’t it odd that stating something that was a bedrock policy just a couple of decades ago is now considered heresy. Food, heat and electricity policies should prioritize reliability and affordability to maintain societal stability and economic mobility. Deliberately over-taxing the basic essentials of life creates poverty and social unrest.

        1. Another Bingo! Today

          Those are precisely what governments are for: to ensure that citizens can do that themselves and not to do it for citizens or choose what for which citizens

  3. Make batteries or any other grid-stabilizing power source the responsibility of wind and solar proponents. They couldn’t compete and they would go away with the least amount of political noise.

  4. Bureaucrats and politicians who are ignorant of the physics and meteorology love to toss around terms like “megawatts” and “grid-scale storage” as if they know what they’re talking about. They don’t. Their knowledge of electricity stops at the wall receptacle. One would think that schoolteachers, at least, especially high-school science teachers, would know better, but in my experience that’s a forlorn hope. And they’re teaching this green stuff to kids, as if it’s a solution. We’re sunk, according to the Learning Factor of Primacy. What’s that? This:

    PRIMACY – Present new knowledge or skills correctly the first time. (Teach it right the first time.)
    When students are presented with new knowledge or skills, the first impression received is almost unshakeable. This means that what you teach must be correct the first time. Students may forget the details of lessons, but will retain an overall image of the skill or knowledge for a long time.

  5. Battery Energy Storage on microgrids, or otherwise, spontaneously combust and burn as well as BEV’s. And the fire department is going to stay at the Minimum Approach Distance per safety standards and watch the fire burn.
    A better investment may be to mint that trillion dollar coin and cast it into a volcano.

  6. Batteries must be kept warm in the winter, cool in the summer. They must consume electricity off the grid. Do they meter/pay for it?

    Nat gas plants consume their own electricity, but when turbines aren’t producing do they meter/pay for the electricity to control yaw, pitch, lights, controllers, communications, sensors, heating blades, oil heater, oil pump, oil cooler, hydraulic brake, start-up/ shut-down connections and disconnections to grid? There’s likely more.

    https://www.aweo.org/windconsumption.html

  8. Again our politicians circle the wagon as you need more than one charging station as you need to time your distance to come back and charge or run out of juice on the road.

    So, your looking at at least double the cost of their estimate.

    Not to mention that they haven’t made any long distance transportation vehicle yet for products.

  9. Anyone who played Sim City thirty years ago knows you can either clutter up the map with a bunch of use useless wind turbines that constantly need replacing, or build a few nuclear plants and be set for many years.

  10. 0.04 %. That’s all it takes to change the temperature of the whole earth. Can’t see it. Can’t touch it . Can’t smell it. Can’t hold it. Can’t taste it. Can’t hear it. CO2 has a lot in common with religion. Both have a fundamental belief attached to them. One must believe the premise that what is proposed is true,or bear the terrible consequences of ones disbelief. Disbelievers are now heretics. The politicians yell that their opponents don’t believe in climate change. Main while on the other side of the earth, pragmatists are building more coal plants. The polar ice caps haven’t melted away, the seas have not risen, the winters are still freezing. Polititions still play their games. The day I learned about carbon credits being sold on the stock market I knew this was a complete scam. Buy your way into the good graces of the purveyors the latest money grab, and be rewarded. Pay your taxes and don’t make a fuss,you heretic!

  11. Brian, thanks for all you do on this subject.
    There are a couple of other “elephants in the room” that renewables proponents would rather not have us thinking about. Supposedly this whole push for a renewable grid and EVs is intended to reduce CO2 emissions.
    Ignored issue # 1
    The creation of all those wind farms, solar farms and EVs, etc. requires enormous amounts of minerals that all must be mined out of the earth. All the mining will have to be done using petroleum-fueled equipment. Low concentration ores are usually harvested by open-pit mining which requires removal of enormous amounts of over-burden to expose the ore body. Then the ore must be extracted and concentrated. Many ores only contain about 0.5% of the mineral being mined. The concentrated ore must then be transported long distances to a refiing/processing site to be purified. Then it has to go elsewhere to be manufactured into components, then transported to a site to be assembled into a structure. At every step on the way there is a huge amount of CO2 emitted well before there is any emission saving by supplying renewable power to the grid. Due to the “embeded” CO2 from the mining, processing, manufacturing and construction of the renewable infrastructure, it may be many years before the planet experiences any drop in CO2 resulting from this whole exercise. The need for huge expensive battery backup facilities only makes this much worse in terms of emissions and costs to the publc.
    Ignored issue #2
    The push for EVs requires all the same mining, processing, manufacturing and construction costs and embeded emissions as for the infrastructure in Issue #1. Volkswagen produced a study comparing emissions from an e Golf and a diesel Golf. It looks like the e Golf finally gains an emissions advantage at around the 120,000 Km mark. (This assumes that the EV has not been in a modest accident, requiring battery replacement.) In the example, both cars are taken off the road for recycling at the 200,000Km mark. How do you recycle an EV battery economically? Also, most diesel powered vehicles are driven FAR beyond the 200,oooKm mark.

    This whole initiative is neither as simple nor as effective as proponents an governments would have us believe.

    1. I have to say the argument that we have to burn x amount of fossil fuels to build wind and solar is a weak one. By the same token, we also burn fossil fuels to build bridges, roads, buildings, etc. There are many arguments in this debate, but that one is far from the strongest.

      And all of this assumes you believe in the aforementioned new global religion of anthropogenic climate change. If you do, then even breathing is bad. If you don’t, who cares if the CO2 is for cement for a bridge, turbine base or missile silo?

      1. It’s a catch 22 that no matter what you do it still involves using fossil fuels.
        Taking down trees you still need equipment running on fossil fuels.
        Ignoring the trees become a more worse problem when they catch fire and generate massive amounts of their own toxicity.
        Our politicians don’t believe that a single tree has grown in decades and hence tree planting programs that have not been used because we have no place to put them.
        Hmmm… what to do… what to do?

      2. The point I usually make regarding the use of fossil fuels to build all generating equipment of any kind is far from weak. Try and build any of it without fossil fuels. That sir is the point, they cannot be manufactured without fossil fuels. Today nothing can be built without fossil fuels, except maybe an igloo if you are using a bone knife to cut the snow.

  12. If one were to follow the actual science one would discover that CO2 does not absorb IR longwave (10 microns) radiation, or normal earth temperatures. Even if it did, one lonely molecule of CO2 in 2500 molecules of air, would not have much effect on temperature, if any.
    All efforts to curb CO2 emissions are based on a massive fraud. The Mafia would be proud.

  13. Thank you for your reports, Brian. If our media (cbc ctv and Global) were worth anything you would be on their nightly explaining this to Canadians.

  15. As long as the government is offering free money, the green energy will pile up like empty beer cans..

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