Doug Sheridan Says
So why doesn’t some country somewhere get all of its electricity from wind?
Doug Sheridan Says
Francis Menton writes in the Manhattan Contrarian, wind power is clean, free and renewable. Google the subject, and you will quickly find fifty articles claiming that electricity from wind is now cheaper than electricity from dirty fossil fuels
. So why doesn’t some country somewhere get all of its electricity from wind?
In fact, despite now several decades of breakneck building of wind turbines, no country seems to be able to get even half of its electricity from wind when averaged over the course of a year, and no country has really even begun to solve the problem of needing full backup when the wind doesn’t blow.
Germany has enough wind turbines that they produce big surpluses of electricity when the wind blows at full strength. But they still haven’t cracked the threshold of meeting 50% of electricity demand with wind and sun over the course of a year. It’s no better in the co-climate crusader UK. Despite a crash program to build wind turbines—accompanied by a smidgeon of solar panels—the UK’s percent of power from wind in 2022 was 26.8%. Solar added a paltry 4.4%.
Maybe this project isn’t as easy as the central planners thought it would be. At the website Not A Lot Of People Know That, Paul Homewood presents a calculation for the UK of how much wind turbine capacity would be necessary to supply the country with all its electricity needs by building extra wind capacity and using it to electrolyze water into hydrogen.
Homewood notes average demand in the UK was 29 GW in 2022, and it has 28 GW of wind turbine capacity already. The fact that 28 GW of “capacity” only supplied 26.8% of average demand of 29 GW indicates an average capacity factor of under 30% for the wind turbines.
So, how much wind turbine capacity would be needed to generate enough electricity to supply all of the demand, either directly, or by electrolyzing water to make hydrogen and burning the hydrogen? A total of 370 TWh—262 TWh to supply existing demand, and another 108 TWh for the losses in the processes of electrolysis and then burning the hydrogen. This is about 6 times the current wind turbine capacity of the UK.
The analysis does not go into detail on the costs of this project, other than to note that the cost of the wind turbines alone for the UK would be about $1.3 trillion. And that’s before you get to the cost of building the electrolyzers for the hydrogen, the costs of transporting and storing the stuff, etc. There's also the issue doubling demand for electricity on the grid by electrifying all home heating, automobiles, transportation, etc.
To Sum It Up: Of course, this is all quite damning. But, in the short run, don’t expect the climate doom crowd to walk away from any of their grand plans. The immediate answer will be more, and still more government subsidies to keep the wind power dream alive. But at some point this becomes, as they say, unsustainable.