The Disadvantages of Wind Power

Wind Energy / Economics

Date posted: 03/21/17

D. S. Brodie prepared a layman-level guide to the serious disadvantages of wind power, the main poster child of so-called renewables, written from a Scottish perspective but applicable to the entire UK. The facts have been drawn from a wide range of publicly accessible studies, reports and authoritative blogs, e.g. from energy analyst Euan Mearns Renewable Energy ... The Most Expensive Policy Disaster in Modern British History, the Civitas report Electricity Costs ... The Folly of Wind Power ... and the study by Mr Derek Partington on The Intermittency of UK Wind Power Generation. The subjective views in this guide are my own. Many of the arguments against wind power also apply to other sources that are unfit energy technologies that politicians and the energy industries unjustifiably yet brazenly promote as sustainable renewables, e.g. biomass (i.e. wood), with the Drax coal-fired power station expensively converted to burn expensive, unsustainable clear-felled North American forests with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions higher than the locally mined coal it used to burn. First, a brief outline of the essentials of wind power. Wind in the UK is very intermittent and the electricity output of a wind turbine is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. This means that a 20% drop in wind speed gives a fall in wind electricity supply of almost 50%. Because of wind intermittency the average output of the UK wind farm fleet is only about 30% of rated (installed) capacity, with peaks of up to about 80% and lows of not much at all, e.g. less that 5% of rated capacity for about 7% of the time. The national grid has to be balanced exactly at all times to match electricity supply to varying customer demand. Nuclear power plants supply steady baseload and are not suitable for making rapid balancing adjustments.