Even after 30 years of huge subsidies, it provides about zero
energy
My Spectator article on
the futile numbers behind wind power:
The Global Wind Energy Council recently
released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind
energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was
revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was
installed across the global market last year’.
You may have got the impression from
announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in
any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big
contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is
still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of
irrelevance.
Even put together, wind and photovoltaic
solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the
International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind
provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide
combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just
electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the
solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport
and industry.
[One critic suggested I should have used
the BP numbers instead, which show wind achieving 1.2% in 2014 rather than
0.46%. I chose not to do so mainly because that number is arrived at by falsely
exaggerating the actual output of wind farms threefold in order to take into
account that wind farms do not waste two-thirds of their energy as heat; also
the source is an oil company, which would have given green blobbers a excuse to
dismiss it, whereas the IEA is unimpleachable But it's still a very small
number, so it makes little difference.]
Such numbers are not hard to find, but
they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables
lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close
to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that
this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass
(mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks
and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people
need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke
inhalation.
Even in rich countries playing with
subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from
wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has
been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and
2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000
terawatt-hours.
If wind turbines were to supply all of
that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer
is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005
terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been
built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called
industry in the early 2000s.
At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres
per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines
would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including
Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered
every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms.
Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to
displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently
supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. [para corrected from original.]
Do not take refuge in the idea that wind
turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you
can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already
close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term)
is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet
will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
As machines, wind turbines are pretty good
already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that.
It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for
mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons.
It’s just not very good.
As for resource consumption and
environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and
bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But
out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia
by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This
generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase
‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time
it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from
the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need
about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined
cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for
smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made
using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil
fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about
250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes
about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of
coal for making the cement and
you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000
wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with
increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year.
That’s about half the EU’s
hard coal–mining output.
Forgive me if you have heard this before,
but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff
also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.
The point of running through these numbers
is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think
that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply,
let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late
David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable
renewables.
MacKay, former chief scientific
adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said in
the final interview before his tragic death last year that the idea
that renewable energy could power the UK is an “appalling delusion” -- for this
reason, that there is not enough land.
The truth is, if you want to power civilisation
with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power
generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable
reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing —
are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the
lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth
creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.
And let’s put some of that burgeoning
wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the
second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything
else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually
counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the
poor to make the rich even richer.
