Sustaining the Wind, Part I...
A group calling itself “The FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance,” working out of the Frankfurt School, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program and the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Group has published study called “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment, according to which, in the period between 2004 and 2014, the world expenditure on so called “renewable energy” amounted to 1.801 trillion dollars (US). Of this, 711 billion dollars was applied to developing wind energy, an amount exceeded only by the investment in solar energy, which was 875.1 billion dollars in that same period.
The total “investment” in so called “renewable energy” in the last ten years is greater than the annual GDP (2013) of 179 of 192 nations as recorded by the World Bank , only 75 billion dollars smaller than the GDP of India, a nation estimated to contain a population of 1.396 billion human beings as of 2015, roughly 20% of the human race. For the amount of money spent on so called “renewable energy” in the last decade we could have written a check for about $1,200 dollars to every man, woman and child in India, thus almost doubling the per capita income of that country. It is roughly comparable to the 2013 GDP of Canada, a few hundred billion dollars larger than the annual 2013 GDP of Australia...
...The “WWF” figures assume that the steel for the predicted energy production for wind energy will take place over a period of 35 years. This would mean that two year’s steel production more or less would go to make wind turbines, and 33 years of production would produce other things, if, and this is a very big if, steel production can be maintained through this period at the levels now obtained.
The situation with respect to aluminum is more problematic. According to the World Aluminum Institute, in 2014, the world produced 53,034,000 MT of aluminum. Thus over the next 35 years, about the total of 7 years of production of this metal, at current levels, would be needed to construct the wind plants that the WWF happily predicts...
...Utilizing this 2013 intensity figure for 2014 production, we can estimate that the world used about 770 billion kWh of electricity to produce aluminum, or about 2.8 exajoules of electrical energy. Thus we see that the entire wind industry on the entire planet as of 2012 was only capable of producing just 67% of the electricity required to produce aluminum in 2014, never mind the electricity for running computers to host and read websites telling us how great the so called “renewable energy” industry is.
...The critical materials evaluated, with the quantities of ore required for an 800 kW on shore wind turbine (as found in table 3 in the reference) are fluorspar (145 kg), cobalt (196 grams), tantalum (545 grams), gold (514 grams), silver (1.5 kg), as well as, of most immediate concern, indium (1.21 kg), and small amounts of the elements palladium, platinum, rhodium and rhenium. I have chosen to report here the figures for an 800 kw on-shore wind turbine, but figures are also reported for off-shore turbines on a larger scale. The interested reader (with access) is invited to view the data in the original paper for onshore and offshore turbines. The paper does not focus, as we will do, later in this series, on supplies of the lanthanide elements neodymium and dysprosium, although these elements are very critical to the best performing wind turbines, not that the performance of any wind turbine, given their poor capacity utilization, can be described as “good.”
The Danes – and we will see that despite all the hoopla that has surrounded their wind program their actual energy production from wind energy is very small, even compared to wind capacity in other countries like the United States, Germany and China – keep an exhaustive and very detailed database of every single wind turbine they built in the period between the 1978 and the present day. If one downloads the Excel file available in the link for reference 29 one can show that the Danes, as of the end of March 2015, have built and operated 8,002 wind turbines of all sizes. Of these, 2727, or 34.1% of them have been decommissioned. Of those that were decommissioned, the mean lifetime was 16.94 years (16 years and 310 days). Twenty-one of the decommissioned wind turbines operated less than two years, two never operated at all, and 103 operated for less than 10 years. Among decommissioned turbines, the one that lasted the longest did so for 34 years and 210 days. Among all 2727 decommissioned wind turbines, 6 lasted more than 30 years...
...Recall that the authors of reference 28 made two statements. One was that the WWF predicted that by 2050 the world would have 25,000 TWh of electricity produced by wind power. For the last full year for which we have the Danish data, 2014, the wind industry in Denmark produced 13.04 TWh of electricity. Thus to scale up to 25,000 TWh/yr, the wind industry would need to be about 1900 times larger than the Danish wind industry, requiring, if the Dane’s averages hold, about 8,000 X 1900 = 15,200,000 turbines averaging 930 kW capacity. The second statement was that each 800 kW turbine required 1.2 kg of indium. Thus if 930 kW turbines could ultimately be built in the future using as much indium as 800 kW turbines use now, over 18,000 tons of indium would be required.
There’s only one problem with that figure. As far as we can tell, economically recoverable indium reserves on the entire planet are thought to be somewhere between 11,000 tons and 50,000 tons. Moreover, the current concern with indium supplies has nothing to do with wind power. The chief uses for indium right now are to produce “ITO,” Indium Tin Oxide, for use in touch screen cell phones and computer monitors and to manufacture CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Selenide) thin film solar cells...
It's my own piece, which I'm shamelessly pimping, rather long and desultory, I'm afraid, but graciously published on his website, Brave New Climate, by Dr. Barry Brook.
Sustaining the Wind. Part I.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Tue Jul 28, 2015, 09:40 AM - Edit history (1)
It's a tour-de-force deconstruction of the Emperor's new wardrobe.
You've become the James Randi of renewable energy. 
We just need to roll back some more regulations and cut taxes on the rich.
The only way to quit fossil fuels is TO QUIT FOSSIL FUELS.
Otherwise you get these market distortions where cheap and dirty fossil fuels are used to refine materials for wind and solar power systems.
Welcome to the worst place on earth...
The way "free" markets work fossil fuels will not be "replaced" by any competing technology. Rather, total human energy use will simply increase.
The only way to stop this cycle is to increasingly restrict the use of fossil fuels until the extraction of them reaches zero, and then let the consequences of that (probably great "austerity" at first!) be dealt with as the current economic system collapses.
We're not going to quit fossil fuels in that manner, but nevertheless the current economic system will collapse as earth's climate changes.
Furthermore, a world economy powered by wind and solar would look nothing like the economy of today. Wind and solar will never be a "drop in" replacement for fossil fuels.
The same is true of nuclear power, especially in this age of fossil fueled transportation, but a nuclear powered economy is the one most similar to today's economy. That's why Japan is restarting its nuclear plants. Importing fossil fuels was bad business, bad for their trade balance, bad for the environment.
to rebut what you write here as well...
Renewables K.O.-ed by EROI?
08 Sep 2014 by Craig Morris Comments (10)
If it takes too much energy to make generators of renewable energy relative to what these units produce, the energy transition will not be possible. A new study by nuclear researchers finds that the need for storage and backup makes the EROI of renewables too low. Craig Morris investigates.
King of renewables: Hydro power is the most efficient power source in terms of energy payback. (Photo by Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) is an expression of energy payback – how much energy we get out of the energy we put into a system. Overall, the safest thing you can say about EROI is that it is controversial and hard to calculate to everyone’s satisfaction, as this article in Scientific American explained last year.
Now, a new scientific paper by nuclear researchers in Germany is making the rounds, such as on this popular website among nuclear advocates arguing for nuclear as a way of combating climate change. A version was published by Elsevier and is available behind a paywall. For free, you can access the draft submitted (PDF). Below, my comments apply for both versions.
Much of the paper is devoted to explaining how the calculations for EROI were made. The main tweak revolves around the authors’ rejection of a common way of counting renewable energy – with “renewable” always written in quotation marks in the study. The debate is not new; ....
Here, “buffered” indicates the energy payback of a technology within a supply system, the assumption being that solar and wind (and apparently hydro) require storage and backup capacity, both of which further reduce the “unbuffered” EROI, which only measures, say, the energy put into and gotten from a solar panel.
This is where the argument begins to unravel, for the assumption is untrue. Germany has pumped hydropower storage capacity, but none of it was built for solar or wind. The largest such facility in Germany is in Goldisthal, where construction began in 1997....
Read more~
http://energytransition.de/2014/09/renewables-ko-by-eroi/
present here is absolute truth, we have no hope) I have to ask if you are considering recent studies & advancements in wind energy? Without question, you are more knowledgeable on the subject than I, but do you not think the advances being made will help make wind energy in the near future a viable source and even necessary to facilitate transitioning away from fossil fuels? Same for solar, many advances being made....
Ie,
EIA Analysis: Wind Energy Is The Lowest-Cost Option For Reducing Carbon Emissions
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112789671
Two reports suggest that wind is being installed at a rapid rate, that its costs are plummeting, that its technologies are advancing, and that it is creating a growing number of jobs.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112789609
Also see~
Can we afford storage? A dynamic net energy analysis of renewable electricity generation supported by energy storage†
Michael Carbajales-Dale *a, Charles J. Barnhart a and Sally M. Benson b
aGlobal Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: mikdale@stanford.edu; Fax: +1-650-723-9190; Tel: +1-650-725-8579
bDepartment of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University, USA
Received 25th June 2013 , Accepted 5th February 2014
First published on the web 5th February 2014
....5 Discussion
The results clearly demonstrate the advantages of technologies (both generation and storage) with low CEeD, as well as generation technologies with high capacity factors. Combining low CEeD generation and storage technologies allows a greater proportion of the electrical output to be available to society, rather than being consumed by the industry to fuel its own growth. On-shore wind can support 72 hours of geologic storage while maintaining its current growth rate and still consume only around 10–20% of its own output. In fact, this combination could support growth rates of 100% per year (i.e. double in size each year) and still maintain an energy surplus.
Combining sc-Si at its current growth rate with 24 hours of battery storage would entail the technology consuming around 150% of its own electrical output in deploying new capacity. While this is clearly manageable when PV provides only a small fraction of global electricity supply, it would be difficult to sustain when PV penetration rates increase.
I'll not be looking forward to your next installment, but I'll read it. lol, sorry, its just so depressing... I'm hoping you might present evidence that the renewable industry can find other less toxic or endangered components for their operations.
My mind is open, but heavily skewed against apocalyptic reasoning which doesn't allow for changing technologies.
Last edited Fri Aug 14, 2015, 11:59 PM - Edit history (1)
...this is a product of your own attachment to so called "renewable energy."
Maybe you need to rethink your position.
The fact that so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable does not imply that nothing is sustainable.
We are seeing a sea change among environmentalists - real environmentalists as opposed to people who simply spout rote rhetoric - who are embracing, at long last, nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is not perfect, as anyone can see. However it need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The reason that nuclear energy is superior to everything else is a function of its high energy/mass ratio. In half a century of operations, used nuclear fuel has accumulated about 75,000 tons of mass. By contrast the dangerous fossil fuel industry puts about 2 to 3 billion tons a month. What is remarkable about used nuclear fuel is that it doesn't kill people. Air pollution, by contrast, kills millions of people each year.
Which one is "dangerous?"
As Jim Hansen pointed out, nuclear energy saves lives, and it is responsible for the prevention of the dumping of more than 60 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the form of carbon dioxide: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895: Unlike many papers in the primary scientific literature - including many of those Icited in the "Sustaining the Wind Series" although I've provided links for those who do have such access - this paper is open access. Anyone can read it.)
Not all advocates of so called renewable energy are mindless anti-nukes, but whether they are or not, the fact is that what they advocate, so called "renewable energy" has soaked up vast sums of money and resources for little or no result. So called renewable energy is not sustainable, period, because it relies on exotic (and often toxic) elements that will not allow it to produce even a fraction of the 560 exajoules of energy humanity consumes each year.
I admit, to my great shame when I consider that a large fraction of my morally inept generation is responsible for this unfortunate episode of "group think," that nuclear energy has had bad press. Traditionally that subset of people who advocate for so called "renewable energy" and who demonize nuclear energy are engaged in selective attention. They are more interested in an atom of cesium 134 in a tuna fish than the fact that 7 million people die each year from air pollution. (See the Lancet reference in the first part of "Sustaining the Wind."
We live in an unfortunate generation where we hear only what we want to hear, and where we hate the truth if it's "depressing." Personally, I wish we lived in a courageous time - future generations will be well within their rights for vilifying us for our cowardice - where we faced the truth because it is the truth, and dealt with it.
This is very much an ethical issue, as I attempted to explain in my first post on Dr. Brook's website: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come.
A note on your references: For the record, for the last two or three decades of my life, I've generally spent between ten to twenty hours a week - sometimes much more - reading the primary scientific literature. Even when one reads peer reviewed journals, one needs a healthy dose of critical thinking. I will comment on my views about this in Part 5 of the series. Some blog posts, which are not reviewed, have merit, but many more are pure garbage. Regrettably, this is also true, if in smaller proportion, for some of what one reads in the primary scientific literature.
If one cruises around here, or anywhere else on the internet, one can find millions of posts screaming praises of all the things so called "renewable energy" "could" do. It's always "could do," never "is doing." This sort of thing has been going on for most of my adult life and I'm not young. (When I was young, I confess, I believed that stuff, because I wanted to believe it.) One needs to simply ask, if so called "renewable energy" is so great, why are we now burning more dangerous coal, more dangerous gas, and more dangerous petroleum than we have ever done, this after half a century of mindless cheering for wind and solar.
The wind industry and the solar industry are both trivial. They can't even run the servers dedicated to saying how wonderful they are.
Frankly, it may be too late, but we still need to wake up and smell the fumes. We may survive if we do so, but if we don't, we'll surely simply choke to death. One path has some hope. The other has none.
The new report finds wind is poised to become a dominant and possibly the primary source of electricity in the U.S.
Clayton Handleman
August 13, 2015
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently released data showing that the capacity factor (CF) for wind power can reach 65 percent -- comparable to the CF of fossil-fuel-based generation.
While the headlines aren’t as sexy as Tesla’s "Ludicrous mode," the transformative implications for climate change dwarf Elon Musk’s latest accomplishment. Increasing a generator’s CF can increase its value in a variety of ways, including: reduced cost of energy, improved transmission-line utilization, and often, reducing stress on the grid by providing more power at times of peak demand. It will also likely reduce the amount of storage and natural gas needed to manage the grid under scenarios of high renewables penetration. Implicitly, NREL’s new report positions wind to become a dominant and possibly the primary source of electricity in the U.S.
Figure 1: Areas of the U.S. With Various Gross Capacity Factors for Differing Wind Technologies
Wind Potential Chart US 072015
Source: NREL
Note: The curve to the left shows the historical data, the middle (red) curve shows the data for state-of-the-art turbines, and the blue shows the anticipated performance of "near-future" turbines.
CF is the ratio of a generator’s average power output over a year to its nameplate rating. A CF of 100 percent would indicate that the generation source was always on and operating at its full rated power. Simply stated, a higher capacity factor means a generator of a given size will produce more energy over the year. CF sets a lower bound on the amount of time that a generator operates. If a generator is not operating at its full nameplate rating all the time, then it will produce power for a percentage of time that exceeds its CF.
With little fanfare, NREL released updated data showing that, with current technology, wind turbines could generate more than enough energy at 55 percent CF to power the entire U.S. However, the real stunner is that near-future turbine technology (i.e., 140-meter towers) could boost that to 65 percent CF. With the current national average wind CF (see page 34) at about 33 percent, this represents a near doubling. According to NREL, using current technology and siting it in prime locations, wind power CF can already exceed that of natural gas. Using "near-future" technology, wind power’s CF will exceed the CFs of both coal (61 percent) and natural gas (48 percent) achieved nationwide in recent years....
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/new-nrel-data-suggests-wind-could-replace-coal-as-nations-primary-generatio?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=Headline&utm_campaign=GTMDaily
