Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Wind farms have been the primary source of electricity in the United Kingdom for the past two consecutive quarters, marking the longest stretch on record that renewable energy has surpassed fossil fuels in U.K. electricity generation.
Today’s misinformation from Reuters, who once upon a time used to be a trusted source of news:
Wind farms have been the primary source of electricity in the United Kingdom for the past two consecutive quarters, marking the longest stretch on record that renewable energy has surpassed fossil fuels in U.K. electricity generation.
Total electricity generation from wind sources during the first three months of 2024 was 25.3 terawatt hours (TWh), compared to 23.6 TWh from all fossil fuel sources, according to data from energy think tank Ember.
Wind power accounted for an average of 39.4% of total electricity during the first quarter of 2024, compared to 36.2% from fossil fuels.
Wind output also exceeded fossil fuel-powered output during the final quarter of 2023, marking the first time that wind power has generated more electricity than fossil fuel plants in the U.K. for consecutive quarters.
When combined with output from solar farms, total electricity output from renewable sources in the U.K. was 27.1 TWh during Q1 2024, the highest quarterly total ever for the U.K. and a record 42.2% share of total electricity generation.
WIND LULL OVER SUMMER
Due to seasonal lulls in wind speeds during the summer, that renewable electricity generation total may start to decline over the coming months.
In 2023, wind generation during the second and third quarters were 46% and 34% lower respectively than during the first quarter, and similar declines in wind generation are possible in 2024 if normal wind speed patterns unfold.
Higher solar output during sunnier periods will offset some of the decline from wind farms, as solar output in the U.K. tends to peak at around 5 TWh during the second quarter of the year, compared to just below 2 TWh during the first quarter.
But as wind farms typically generate roughly six times more electricity than solar farms in the U.K., total renewable generation is still likely to dip notably during the middle of 2024.
Utilities looking to keep fossil fuel use to a minimum during the summer may deploy greater quantities of electricity generated by nuclear reactors, bioenergy facilities and hydro dams to ensure total generation loads remain stable.
It has utterly no relevance at all how much electricity wind power produced over the quarter. What is relevant is that we still needed a full fleet of CCGT stations to fill the gap when the wind did not blow.
Their naivety in believing that you can simply tap into nuclear power in summer is shocking, coming as it does from an outfit that advises the imbecile Ed Miliband. Nuclear plants cannot be switched on and off in this way, and certainly would not be economical.
That is why we are still wholly reliant on natural gas to provide enough electricity when we need it.
The crash in Siemens Energy’s share price on Friday has admirably highlighted an issue with wind costs that colleagues and I have been examining for more than a decade. The painful facts are that (i) wind generation, both onshore and offshore, is more expensive than we are being told and (ii) the performance of wind turbines tends to deteriorate with age, in significant part because of the kind of failures reported by Siemens Energy.
The crash in Siemens Energy’s share price on Friday has admirably highlighted an issue with wind costs that colleagues and I have been examining for more than a decade. The painful facts are that (i) wind generation, both onshore and offshore, is more expensive than we are being told and (ii) the performance of wind turbines tends to deteriorate with age, in significant part because of the kind of failures reported by Siemens Energy. There is strong evidence to support these conclusions, which has been presented in reports published by the Renewable Energy Foundation in 2012 and in 2020 for the UK and Denmark, with updates provided by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch.
The news about Siemens Energy brings a strong inclination to say ‘you were warned’. However, their travails are a symptom of a much more widespread disease, which affects all of us, either directly through the costs of electricity or indirectly as the owners of wind farms (via pension funds and other investment vehicles). The plunge in the share price of Siemens Energy is dramatic, but that may be written off as a temporary market response to disappointed expectations. We need to look beneath the immediate story to understand the reasons for the disappointment and their implications for the prospects for wind generation.
The announcement by Siemens Energy focused on higher-than-expected failure rates for their onshore turbines. These were ascribed to problems with key components, but newspaper reports suggest more systematic design faults in recent generations of large turbines. Previous announcements have referred to problems with offshore turbines, and the market reaction suggests few believe that the current problems are confined to onshore turbines. Further, while each of the major turbine manufacturers has its own specific problems, Siemens Energy is not unique in experiencing high warranty costs due to higher than anticipated failure rates.
In increasing order of importance, there are three aspects to note:
(a) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers have given warranties on performance that won’t be met because of higher failure rates. They will incur additional expenses, either to replace components or to compensate wind farm operators for any resulting underperformance. Those costs are the basis for the write-offs that Siemens Energy has had to take. Investors will be painfully aware that the company has been declaring profits when they sell wind turbines, but without making adequate provision for future warranty repair costs.
In accounting terms this is known as recognising future profits for new contracts. When it becomes clear that the contracts will be less profitable, the company must write down the value of previously reported profits and, thus, the value of the assets on its balance sheet. In effect, though perhaps entirely innocently, the company has been misleading investors about its past and current profitability. Senior managers should be feeling very uncomfortable about their positions since the problem was predictable (and predicted).
(b) Warranties have a limited period – often 5 to 8 years – but the higher failure rates will persist and affect performance over the remainder of the life of the wind farms where the turbines have been installed. Their future opex costs will be higher than expected, and their output will be significantly lower. This will reduce their operational lifetimes, which are determined by how the margin between revenues and costs changes as wind farms get older. Lower revenues and higher costs bring forward the date at which replacement or repowering is necessary. These changes will reduce, often quite substantially, the returns earned by the financial investors – pension funds and other – to whom operators sell the majority of the equity in wind farms after a few years of operation.
(c) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers may argue that they can – with time – fix the component and design problems which lead to high failure rates. They may well be correct. The history of power engineering is littered with examples of new generations of equipment which experienced major problems when first introduced but which were eventually sorted out. Many companies have found themselves in severe financial difficulties or even forced into bankruptcy by these “teething” problems. The error in this case has been to pretend that wind turbines were immune to such failures.
The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.
In the longer term it is (b) and (c) that are the big story. With respect to (a), serious analysts have long since recognised that claims made about future wind costs and performance by the wind industry should not be taken seriously. It has been obvious that they were kidding themselves and their investors ever since the last 2010s. Unfortunately, we have now been tied into a high energy-cost future, with all the implications that has for the economy and standards of living.
The Swedish Government has ditched its targets for “100% renewable energy” supply amid a shift back to nuclear power in the latest blow for the unreliable and inefficient technology.
The Swedish Government has ditched its targets for “100% renewable energy” supply amid a shift back to nuclear power in the latest blow for the unreliable and inefficient technology.
Announcing the new policy in the Swedish Parliament, the Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said: “This creates the conditions for nuclear power. We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”
Environmental campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the move, saying the Swedish decision is “an important step in the right direction, implicitly acknowledging the low quality of unstable wind and solar, and is part of a general collapse of confidence in the renewable energy agenda pioneered in the Nordic countries and in Germany”.
Sweden remains committed to “100% fossil-free” energy provision, but the change means it now sees nuclear power as critical to achieving it.
Sweden can “afford to reject fossil fuels, relying on nuclear and hydro and biomass”, Net Zero Watch suggests. But the U.K. should go further, since in “substantial industrialised economies… only a gas to nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialised and competitive”.
Others have suggested that burning vast amounts of biomass i.e., wood is not really more ecologically friendly and lower-emission than burning the much more energy-dense fuels of gas and coal. Further objections to biomass and other fossil fuel alternatives include that lowering carbon dioxide emissions is not really a worthwhile goal for an individual country or globally as the potential harms of the gas are uncertain and exaggerated and the benefits overlooked.
Dr. John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Energy Director, said that “living close to Russia focuses the mind”, and the Swedish people wish to “ground their economy in an energy source, nuclear, that is physically sound and secure, unlike renewables which are neither”.
“For the time being the U.K. Government continues to live in a fantasy of its own making, but we are coming to the end of the green dream,” he added.
Bill Ponton’s new Report, “The Cost of Increasing Wind Power: A Reality Check,” contains a short but pithy section addressing the question of energy storage. Here’s the question to be addressed: If after the first round of overbuilding, adding new wind generation resources adds little useful energy and most of the added generation ends up getting “curtailed,” then why not just add some batteries or other energy storage to the system? Wind energy advocates suggest that some form of batteries can store the excess electricity production until it is needed, and everything will then just balance out in perfect equilibrium.
Is there any problem here? Ponton does the simple calculations with his UK 2022 spreadsheet to derive how much storage in GWh will be needed, and what its functional characteristics must be. His results are very similar to the results of comparable exercises previously undertaken by Roger Andrews for California and Germany, and Ken Gregory for the U.S.
The main problem identified by Ponton is the same one previously identified by Andrews and Gregory. Before you even get to the very high cost of storing electricity, there is another huge hurdle, which is that the availability of wind to generate electricity varies with a seasonal pattern. Therefore, to match electricity supplied to electricity demanded, the storage balance must be built up over about a six month period to an enormous level, and then discharged over the following six month period.
Ponton considers the case of a tripling of UK wind generation rated capacity, from the current 28 GW to 84 GW. Average usage is about 35 GW, and peak usage is about 45 GW; so the 84 GW of rated wind capacity provides plenty of spare electricity to charge the batteries when the wind is blowing at full strength, or even close to that.
Ponton next assumes purchase of 12,000 GWh of battery storage capacity. With that in place, here is his chart of additions and withdrawals from storage based on the UK 2022 data:
You can immediately see that the wind is much stronger and more consistent in the Spring and Fall than in the Summer. Then, here is the chart of the storage balance, assuming you initialized the system with zero storage at January 1, 2022:
The batteries build up to the 12,000 GWh maximum by about March, then discharge through September, and then begin building the storage balance back up starting in October. On the particular weather pattern of 2022, the 12,000 GWh of storage capacity was sufficient to get through the year, with the minimum stored amount in September being more than 1,000 GWh.
For readers who don’t recall the previous results from Andrews and Gregory, here is Andrews’s comparable chart for California based on 2017 data:
And here is Gregory’s chart for the U.S. with two different lines representing 2019 and 2020 data, both again showing the characteristic seasonal pattern:
All these results clearly illustrate the problem that the energy storage to accomplish the task of using the excess production from wind must have both very large capacity and the ability to charge and discharge in one grand annual cycle. Ponton’s comment:
Batteries do not exist that are up to the task of such long-term energy storage.
Pumped water storage does at least theoretically have the ability to charge and discharge to meet this criterion of an annual cycle, but it also has the problems of enormous cost and, even more important, complete lack of sufficient suitable sites. Ponton:
If there were sites in the UK for pumped storage, it would cost $2 trillion. The UK would have to construct 500 pumped storage facilities with 24,000 MWh capacity [each]. Each would be comparable in size to the largest facility in existence at Bath, VA, which cost $4 billion to construct.
My own comment: Ponton’s illustration of 12,000 GWh of storage needed to get through the year represents about 14-15 days of average usage in the UK. That figure is quite low compared to the amounts of storage found by Andrews and Gregory to be needed for California and the for entire U.S., which are in the range of 25-30 days of average usage. I think the difference is explained by the following things:
Andrews and Gregory assumed a renewables mix of wind and solar facilities in similar proportion to what exists currently in California and in the entire U.S., respectively. Ponton assumes only wind as the renewable addition. This makes a substantial difference because solar generation is much more seasonal even than wind, and operates at a much lower average annual capacity factor. (Note that both California and the full U.S. have substantial solar in the mix. Since solar is strongest in the summer, the peak of the annual charge/discharge cycle in the Andrews and Gregory spreadsheets is later in the year than in the Ponton spreadsheet. But the annual cyclical pattern is basically the same.)
Ponton assumes that the “other” category of generation currently existing in the UK remains in place. This “other” category consists of a mix of things like coal, nuclear, hydro and biomass, most or all of which may well be on the environmentalists’ chopping block. As shown on Ponton’s charts, the “other “ category operates at a quite steady 10 or so MW, covering almost a third of the UK’s average usage like a “baseload” generator. The continued existence of this “other” category substantially reduces the annual seasonality of production over what would be the case of wind was expected to take over all power generation.
Ponton has no assumptions for losses in storage, such as the loss from every charge/discharge cycle, or the dissipation loss from having energy stored in a battery for months on end. Since the costs he comes to are already ridiculous before adding these additional elements, he can be forgiven for not continuing to beat the dead horse.
Ponton does not compute prices for 12,000 GWh of storage using lithium ion batteries, which is reasonable since those batteries are not up to the job of storing energy for 6 months to a year without catastrophic loss. But just to give an idea, at $250 per kWh (lower than current prices for grid-scale storage), 12,000 GWh would run about $3 trillion — approximately equal to the entire annual GDP of the UK. If you start trying to shift the coal and nuclear production in the UK to wind, and if you then consider major losses from trying to store power for up to a year before use, you can multiply that $3 trillion by a factor of 2 or 3 or maybe 4. Whatever.
As stated many times at this site, this will never happen. The only question is how disastrous the crash will be when it all falls apart.
Again, many thanks to Bill Ponton for putting in the work to demonstrate these issues, all without compensation.
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