Talk:Wind power/Archive 5

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Intermittency

In the intro, the article currently says "The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power to supply a low proportion of total demand. Where wind is to be used for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs for compensation of intermittency are considered to be modest.". I have no doubt that some people hold that opinion (particularly the first sentence), but can it really be stated as fact? It smells a little of bias to me. Moreover, the citation given doesn't seem to strongly support the view, and says something along the lines of "studies are ongoing" and avoids any strong conclusions. TastyCakes (talk) 20:28, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

I think you're right - without reading the whole paper cited I searched for the word "intermittency" and only came up with one hit, and that's in the title of one of the references. So as the paper itself doesn't use the term I think, at best, the statement above would be synthesis. Richerman (talk) 23:34, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Its not an opinion, it is the view of a large group of experts who have reviewed all the available evidence for the UK - and which is a far more problematic system than the US or Canada since it is much smaller. See the UKERC report.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/ImportedResources/PDF/06/0604_Intermittency_report_final.pdf

The wording is perfeclty adequate - it means "not worth worring about, not significant, not a big issue"Engineman (talk) 10:26, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes it is a fact - just read the other references - from National Grid UK, to the IEA etc. Engineman (talk) 02:10, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Which references specifically? If they do support it and it isn't disputed by other references of similar weight, why aren't they cited after the statement is made? I believe this statement should be removed from the introduction because even if it is true in Europe's case (which I am not convinced of) and even if everyone does agree with that (which I am even less convinced of) and even if it weren't a complete unquantified matter of opinion what is considered "seldom" or "modest" (which it is), I know for a fact that it is disputed in other parts of the world, like Alberta where the governing electric board has put caps on how much wind power can be created out of fear of it not being a stable enough source and leading to blackouts. TastyCakes (talk) 15:40, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

While I agree that the quote you object to in your first comment suffers from weasel words (what is the meaning of "low proportion", "moderate fraction", "seldom" and "modest"?), the example from Alberta does not strictly appear to contradict the claims, as the example does not appear to assert either of these things:

• That the governing electric board's caps on wind power are substantially below the "moderate fraction of demand" (whatever that could be).
• That the additional costs for compensation of intermittency in Alberta are "immodest".

You also did not state whether Alberta's caps are to be temporary or permanent. A temporary cap on construction of wind farms might be necessary in a particular region to allow associated infrastructure projects projects to catch up (larger transmission grids, Smart grid, SuperGrid, Grid energy storage, organizing Demand response strategies, etc.). For example, the Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant took eight years to build. A facility of that size could buffer the intermittency from a lot of wind turbines on a daily or weekly basis, but would lack capacity to buffer a large seasonal variation in wind power. One has to read the rest of the Wind power article to get a more accurate view of the grid adaptations necessary to absorb large amounts of wind power. (The best video summary I have seen is The Combined Power Plant on YouTube, which outlines a strategy to supply 100% of electricity from renewables.) The intermittency problems are solvable, but you have to solve them. Electric boards that don't plan for wind could run into problems, just as they would run into problems if they installed large amounts of any particular generating technology without accounting for the particular nature of that technology. Every form of generating technology presents problems for grid management. Hydroelectric plants can have drastic seasonal variations in water flow, nuclear power plants do not follow variations in load and are subject to lengthy unscheduled outages, natural gas plants are subject to unpredictable fuel price spikes or outright shortages, etc. (When did anyone object to a hydroelectric dam project on the basis of its expected seasonal variation in output? Until recently I wasn't even aware that grid managers had been quietly handling this problem for more than a century.) We hear more objections to wind because the technology is new and grid managers are therefore not as knowledgeable about how to handle its particular mix of problems as they are with older technologies they understand better. For example, it's understood that when you build a nuclear power plant, you simultaneously build pumped storage or peaking power plants along with it, because nuclear power plants have little ability to vary their output, and thus they they cannot follow the more-than-factor-of-two daily variations in power demand. Since a nuclear plant takes about ten years to build, there is plenty of time to build the other stuff necessary to make nuclear power usable. Wind power has one of the fastest construction times of any type of utility-scale power. Normally this would be an advantage, except that it sometimes allows wind farms to get ahead of the rest of the grid, in terms of outrunning the available pumped hydro storage and so on. One way for Alberta to deal with its wind power intermittency might be to export most of its wind-generated electricity into the insatiable U.S. energy market, but this would require construction of additional HVDC interties. --Teratornis (talk) 22:57, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I might add that wind turbine manufacturers currently have something like a five year order backlog (although this source seems to put Vestas' order book at just over one year, which may refer to committed orders or something - I gather that if you decided right now you wanted to build a brand new wind farm, you might have to wait five years to get your turbines, since so many projects are ahead of you in the pipe). If Alberta isn't ready to put up more wind turbines, plenty of other people will be happy to jump ahead of Alberta on the waiting lists. This would strongly suggest that there are more regions in the world where the existing or planned grids can handle more wind power than wind turbine manufacturers are able to satisfy right now. That is, the limiting factor in wind power growth right now is not impact on grids, but simply building the turbines. That could of course change in five or ten years if wind turbines begin to saturate the ability of grids to absorb their output, and if compensatory technology does not expand fast enough. But lots of people are talking about the compensatory technology too. --Teratornis (talk) 23:07, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I might further add that if the worst-case scenario for wind power is the occasional blackout, that's a scenario shared by every other form of power generation and transmission. Blackouts have occurred since the invention of electricity generation, and will continue to occur; people have managed. The worst-case scenarios for coal and nuclear are considerably more daunting: runaway global warming (and ultimately, fuel depletion) for the former; catastrophic reactor breach and nuclear terrorism (and also, ultimately, fuel depletion) for the latter. --Teratornis (talk) 23:31, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

You are clearly more informed on this subject than me, so I'll leave what to do with that statement in the intro up to you and other similarly knowledgeable people. But it still reads like a blanket statement to me, over simplified if not non-neutral. You would seem to be right about Alberta, to my knowledge the cap hasn't been approached and it remains a hypothetical in practice. TastyCakes (talk) 15:21, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

The difference is that for wind, the loss of power is a routine event, while for coal and nuclear it's an extraordinary one. That Stanford study says that wind can't be counted on for more than 20% of nameplate capacity, even for a widely-dispersed set of wind farms.

Also, nuclear reactors are capable of load-following (cf. France and the US Navy), it's just that their marginal cost per kW-h is so cheap that they're about the last thing you'd cut back to match falling demand.

—WWoods (talk) 17:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Responding to each point separately:

• An outage that occurs on an average of once per year is little different than an outage that occurs once per week, from the standpoint of grid management. Either way, the grid must have enough backup power or demand-management capacity in place at all times to offset the expected loss of supply. If a nuclear plant goes down for two weeks for a scheduled refueling or an unscheduled repair, another generator unit of comparable size must be ready to step in, and that unit must be ready all year. Each type of generating technology has its own availability schedule. The standard tactic is to link multiple generating units together on a grid, to reduce the chance of too many units failing all at once.
• The Stanford study result shows that interlinked wind farms are actually not much worse than hydroelectric power on the basis of capacity factor, and possibly better during some seasons. See the capacity factors in the table in Hydroelectricity#Countries with the most hydro-electric capacity. France's annual hydro capacity factor is as low as 25%. Individual hydroelectric plants may experience very large seasonal variations in output, producing very little output for months at a stretch. However, grid managers will accept these variations to gain the other advantages of hydro, such as its inherent storage capacity and dispatchability (a hydro plant can go from zero to full power in as little as one minute). Although the 20% "baseload" output of interlinked wind farms might sound bad, that's an artifact of the nameplate capacity of a single wind turbine. Getting full output from all the wind farms at once might be such a rare event that the total nameplate capacity is not a meaningful number. Grid planners might instead design for the output to float between, say, 20% and 40% most of the time. That's within the level of daily demand variation that grids already handle, although a bit more challenging because Wind power forecasting needs more development.
• Wind power is also capable of following load (by feathering turbine blades to spill wind), but this is undesirable for the same reason that throttling back a nuclear plant is undesirable: because the marginal cost of the spilled electricity is so low. When a power source "wants" to run at whatever full output it is capable of at the time, that makes it a bit of a prima donna on the power grid, expecting other power sources to make even larger adjustments to accommodate swings in demand. Wind and nuclear are both prima donnas in this regard. Neither one is ideally suited to following the drastically changing real world electricity demand. In other words, baseload power is a kind of engineering fiction, a mental construct invented to reify the undesirable characteristics of large thermal power plants into something that is somehow desirable. However, the mismatch between nuclear power supply and electricity demand is straightforward to bridge with peaking power plants and grid energy storage. As far as I can recall, the Nuclear debate was never about whether we had to build Pumped-storage hydroelectricity to go along with the nuclear power plants. Having to build the storage or the peaking power was never an issue with nuclear, but for some reason it's made out to be an issue with wind.

Isn't nuclear more or less the opposite of wind in this manner, consistently providing a (usually) predictable amount of power? Why would it need pumped capacity rather than simply be used to provide the baseload? (unless your nuclear capacity is sometimes above your baseload and you want to keep the difference for use when usage peaks, of course) TastyCakes (talk) 17:07, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

My apologies to anyone who is tiring of this discussion, but it's a very important issue because wind power is certainly intermittent. The intermittency of wind might be its number one issue. There is certainly no issue with nuclear accidents or terrorism with wind. Dealing with intermittency is a complex topic and is very easy for people to distort with sound bites. Our job on Wikipedia is to find that neutral point of view somewhere in the middle. I tried to help by starting some navigation templates such as {{Wind power}} and {{Electricity generation}} which link to clusters of articles that describe all the relevant issues. Someone who only reads the Wind power article, for example, might not come away with an adequate understanding of wind power's relationship to the electric grid. They also need to read everything grid-related in {{Electricity generation}}. --Teratornis (talk) 01:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

To reply to the interleaved question: nuclear is more or less the opposite of wind in that it doesn't follow load either, but in a more predictable way most of the time. I'm not sure "Why would it need pumped capacity?" is the right question. The question is really: what is the cheapest way to deliver electricity to consumers who want more than twice as much of it at 3 PM than they want at 3 AM? Nuclear-generated electricity is sufficiently cheaper than gas turbine generated electricity that the difference will pay for a pumped storage plant if a suitable location is available (a steep bluff overlooking a lake, with room on top for a big reservoir). Interestingly, the pumped-storage plant is also cheaper than building the same extra capacity in a nuclear power plant that would be idle at night - nuclear power has capital costs that rule it out for peaking power. When someone proposes building a nuclear power plant, nobody argues against it on the basis that nuclear power doesn't follow the enormous daily and weekly swings in electricity demand. That's because everyone has accepted the engineering fiction of "baseload power." Somehow what is really a limitation of coal-fired and nuclear power plants, that they cannot economically adjust their output to fit transient variations in demand, has instead been spun into a desirable characteristic, or at least a non-problematic one, which then dictates how the rest of the grid must adapt around it. Dealing with the transient nature of wind power is harder than dealing with the inflexibility of baseload plants, but it's really only a harder version of the same problem of not matching the transient demand. It's not a different kind of problem which is somehow unique to wind and is going to exceed our engineering abilities. --Teratornis (talk) 10:16, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I might add that wind turbines have low capacity factors for similar kinds of economic reasons. It's easy to get high capacity factors from wind turbines: just build them with big rotors and small generators, so they reach full output in a low wind speed. If wind speeds are higher than this low speed most of the time at a particular site, the wind turbine can have a high capacity factor. But the average cost of electricity will be higher because the wind turbine will spill most of the available wind energy when the wind blows harder. Thus a good portion of the variation in output from a wind farm comes from the owner's desire to optimize his own economics, i.e. to make more money when the wind is blowing hard, at the expense of whoever has to deal with the resulting variability down the line. In a perfect electricity market, spot pricing would spread the cost of wind variability correctly. The spot price of electricity would send the right signals to producers and consumers, for example rewarding consumers who have the flexibility to schedule their consumption to match high wind periods, and reducing the profit for generating lots of electricity when the wind is blowing hard over many wind farms across a whole region. Spot pricing might shift the economic optimum toward wind turbines with higher capacity factors (e.g., bigger rotors without a proportional increase in generator capacity), but the optimum would probably keep shifting as a function of changes in other generating plants on a grid. --Teratornis (talk) 10:30, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

issues facing high levels of wind penetration

modelling Are people aware of Dr Gregor Czisch's work on modeling the costs and effects of a European hvdc power grid and various combinations of renewables?

He concludes from memory, amongst other things:

70% wind, 30% waste biomass chp plus existing hydro storage would provide 100% renewable electricity at today's power prices. Concentrating solar nor pv are anywhere near as economic as wind power. His work has been presented at a number of gatherings of experts at governmental level and has not as far as i am aware been faulted.

The EU has recently announced plans for such a super grid, mainly to outwit the Russians. In the US Al Gore, and Obama are planning a similar country wide grid. Wind power is the fastest growing form of power generation - 25% per annum.Engineman (talk) 03:22, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Dr Mark Barratt of UCL Dr Mark Barrett, Principal RCUK Academic Research Fellow Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/markbarrett/Index.html has reached similar conclusions looking at the UK only. (I think he includes a bit of tidal and wave power)

Barrats model works by running an entire real UK weather scenario over the UK, and then optimizing the required mix of basically wind and biomassede powered chp. I think he needs an 8GW inter connector compared to the present 2 GW.

Is this the extent of the "consensus" you claim experts on the issues facing high levels of wind penetration have reached? TastyCakes (talk) 04:05, 24 November 2008 (UTC).

Dear Tastycakes - is there any consensus with published papers or from independanmt experts showing that intermittency is a problem with high levels of wind penetration? Engineman (talk) 08:14, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

European Wind Energy Association claims: "Already today a penetration of 20% of power from wind is feasible without posing any serious technical or practical problems." However, that is just a bare assertion on the page I linked, no references from there to technical papers. --Teratornis (talk) 08:29, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Engineman, is there anyone other than this Czisch guy that thinks 70% wind penetration is realistic? I really don't want to have this argument with you again. TastyCakes (talk) 22:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Czisch's papers have been juried, but then the question descends into an evaluation of the biases of those involved in the peer review. The question is not really whether Czisch's 70% number is correct, but how much it would cost. As an engineering exercise, we know that if the entire world was connected on global transmission grid with zero congestion, then it would be plausible for a writer to claim renewables penetration as high as 100%. But building such a transmission system would bankrupt the world. So the question turns to the infrastructure assumptions Czisch is making in order to properly cost out the system. On these questions, Czisch's papers provide little information. Czisch is not without some figures- he does mention that 750 gigawatts of conversion is required. That's not much more than a breadcrumb of data, but let's go with it. As noted in Super grid#Government policy, Transcanada wants $3 billion USD for a 1600km HVDC point to point line that only transmits 3 GW, and that is for overhead wires. The chokepoints across Gibraltar and Sicily-Tunisia are going to have to carry hundreds of gigawatts of undersea cable capacity, and that will be very pricey indeed. So we are easily in the range of multiple trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment. If the prospect of getting political consensus for such a figure in the EU is not discouraging enough, then consider that the transcanada proposed corridor for one 3 GW line is 60 meters, and that corridors will have to carry an order of magnitude more capacity than that. So unless someone can point out where my math is wrong, we should be picturing either 700 meter wide corridors, or multilevel pylons whose height would be staggering. Whether you agree that the capacity will be concentrated in few HVDC corridors, whether they are very wide or very high, the lines have to go somewhere and are going to impose a substantial visual impact. Since the siting process for even conventional systems can take over a decade in the EU, one might be tempted to take the undersea or underground route, but then we are talking about quadruple costs, lower life, and much longer down times. I am willing to assume that Czisch is in the right ballpark with his 70% penetration with 750GW. If the impact of that 750GW figure is not bad enough, consider that it would make the EU dependent on North Africa renewable resources. Does the EU have the cajones for such a project? If I had to take a guess, I wouldn't think they have the federal power or charismatic leadership to pull it off anytime soon. Europe may well have to rely on distributed generation and more robust grid energy storage (as proposed in sci-am's Solar Grand Plan article) coupled with extensive smart grid enabled demand response.-J JMesserly (talk) 23:45, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

It would take at least 20 years before Europe could even imagine 70% from renewables, and if we assume the project of civilization doesn't get seriously interrupted in the meantime, then Moore's law should make considerable progress, making smart grids much simpler and cheaper to build. Thus I think it's fair to be optimistic about demand response being pretty good by then, if we are assuming civilization lasts long enough to get to a green Europe. Strictly speaking, it's not clear that technological society which depends so critically on petroleum (the fossil fuel likely to get scarce first) will maintain its integrity if the global petroleum extraction rate falls too quickly. Since no one can predict the future supply of petroleum with much accuracy, it's hard to say whether these high penetration figures for renewable energy are meaningful. For all we know, civilization may have already passed the point where the remaining fossil fuel reserves are large enough to fuel a transition to renewables while maintaining our accustomed level of economic activity. In any case, it would be interesting to compare the cost of shipping solar energy from North Africa in the form of electricity vs. in the form of algae fuel. Evidently the cost of supertanker shipping is so low that it would be perfectly feasible for Europe to import 100% of its energy in the form of liquid fuel from the most distant ocean port in the world, as long as that port had a sufficient supply of fuel. It would be interesting to know the transmission distance where moving liquid fuel becomes cheaper than moving electricity. Also, it would be interesting to know the average transmission distance per kWh consumed for increasing levels of renewable electricity in Europe. Presumably the effect of increased power generation from intermittent sources is to increase the average transmission distance, but the average distance will not be nearly as large as the distance to the most remote wind farm or solar plant. E.g., we wouldn't expect much Saharan solar electricity to have to get all the way to Norway. --Teratornis (talk) 01:05, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

On page 11 of the Base Case scenario, there are some vague details, but I don't see how these claims can be asserted without going through the meteorological data for a few years in order to verify that the specified grid (where are the terminii, what coorridors?) would not run into congestion problems etc. As an introductory overview, this is interesting, but to move this closer to reality, my guess is that what would be useful for policy analysts would be to see a working model- how much surge GW extra capacity from Norway to cover intermittency? What type of biomass is being burned and in what quantity needed for valley filling? What are the response times of these secondary generators? How much savings from Demand Response when wind/ solar are unavailable? Where are the energy sinks and sources for the various common intermittency events derived from the historical climate data? A walkthrough of the concrete details of some hypothetical transmission system with the necessary generation responding to actual climate conditions would go a long way to advancing the conversation and would reveal areas for further research. Do any such studies exist for EU, US, or China? -J JMesserly (talk) 03:14, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

You may have already seen these Virtual power plant cites:

• "The Combined Power Plant: the first stage in providing 100% power from renewable energy". SolarServer. 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-10. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• The Combined Power Plant on YouTube

I have not seen the original papers coming from the researchers at the University of Kassel who are working on this. --Teratornis (talk) 02:49, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Not a detailed analysis, but from MacKay's Sustainable Energy (available via http://www.withouthotair.com/), Chapter 27, "Five energy plans for Britain":

    "I make plan G by starting again from plan D, ... and bumping up wind power fourfold (relative to plan D) to 32 kWh/d/p, so that wind delivers 64% of all the electricity. This is a 120-fold increase of British wind power over today’s levels. Under this plan, world wind power in 2008 is multiplied by 4, with all of the increase being placed on or around the British Isles.

    The immense dependence of plan G on renewables, especially wind, creates difficulties for our main method of balancing supply and demand, namely adjusting the charging rate of millions of rechargeable batteries for transport. So in plan G we have to include substantial additional pumped storage facilities, capable of balancing out the fluctuations in wind on a timescale of days. Pumped-storage facilities equal to 400 Dinorwigs can completely replace wind for a national lull lasting 2 days. Roughly 100 of Britain’s major lakes and lochs would be required for the associated pumped-storage systems."

For more on the inherent intermittency of wind power, and ways to cope with that, see Chap. 26.

—WWoods (talk) 05:01, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Interesting - Czisch has us connected to new hydro in Iceland and existing hydro in Norway - does Mackay assume this? In a high wind scenario, why not just use the retained and already built coal plant for the 5 percent of the year when there is no wind - 5% carbon as opposed to 100% carbon seems good enough to me. And the cost of keeping a coal plant idle, is tiny since most of the cost of coal power is the fuel not the capital or maintenance and operation.Engineman (talk) 10:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

MacKay doesn't mention that; he's not looking at that sort of specifics, just reviewing the options for power, with their potentials. I should have said the book is available for free as a PDF, so you can read it for yourself.

Did you mean gas, rather than coal? Gas, unlike coal, is expensive per kW·h but can be brought online quickly.

I was thinking more of coal since you can stockpile months of the stuff, and start coal stations well within the weather forecesasting window and we have loads of them in the UK already built. Gas of course can be used just as well, assuming the Russkies let us have the stuff.05:34, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

By the way, have you seen this? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/3867232/Promoters-overstated-the-environmental-benefit-of-wind-farms.html

—WWoods (talk) 21:14, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Penetration and utilization

Would it make more sense to put this subsection under the utilization section, since it seems as if they are more closely related? Penetration really measures the percent of the energy generated by wind power in an area, correct? \

This article seems a bit awkwardly designed. II | (t - c) 00:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Penetration is a general issue and constraint on the proportion of energy that can be delivered by wind. The utilization section talks about how much wind energy is generated in various regions. These are related but should not be combined sections.

What would you do to improve the flow and structure of the article? --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:58, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

2008 Data

Could any body add a new column in the Utiliztion section, so that the data from 2008 can be added.Calvingao (talk) 02:35, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Added with numbers for Germany and the U.S. I also looked for numbers for Spain, Denmark and the UK but didn't easily find any. Rmhermen (talk) 14:55, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Just added data for all missing countries along with a source link with a map of all European countries and their cumulative capacity --cassini83 (talk) 02:09, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Delete the 2005 data and Complete 2007 and 2008

I propose to delete the 2005 data from tables of Utilization of wind power and move them to the Installed wind power capacity. Also create a similar table for the energy generated as well.
Also please complete the data of 2007 and 2008 in both tables, because these two tables are essential to the rescent growth of the wind power.Calvingao (talk) 18:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Four columns is probably ok, I took out a lot of the extra whitespace that was created by two very long country names. But definitely delete 2005 when 2009 data is added next year. Delphi234 (talk) 15:16, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Installed wind power capacity needs updating for 2008 as well. As long as we preserve historical data there, we can keep the table in Wind power concise. I like showing four years in the table here, as it illustrates recent trends, such as the amazing percentage growth in China (more than 100% per year for the past four years). --Teratornis (talk) 22:33, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Done. 199.125.109.56 (talk) 00:56, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

{{editsemiprotected}} Some of the 2008 figures can be updated from,[1] in particular, the world total, 121.2 GW (instead of 120.8 in the lead) (121,187.9 MW), so 120,791 should be replaced with 121,188 (2 places). Spain should be 16,740 instead of 16,754, India should be 9,587 instead of 9,645, United Kingdom should be 3,288 instead of 3,241, Denmark 3,160, instead of 3,180, Australia 1,494 instead of 1,306, Sweden 1,067 instead of 1,021, Ireland 1,245 instead of 1,002, Greece 990 instead of 985, Turkey 333, instead of 433 (if a reference can be found that 433 is correct, it should be so indicated), Belgium 384 instead of 382, Egypt 390, instead of 365, Brazil 338 instead of 341, New Zealand 325 instead of 326, South Korea 278 instead of 236, Finland 140 instead of 143, Morocco 125 instead of 134, Iran 82 instead of 85, and Costa Rica 74 instead of 70. 199.125.109.56 (talk) 18:14, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Not done: please be more specific about what needs to be changed. (As in where are the changes needed to be changed.)

 Done This is not rocket science. Do a text search. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 15:26, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Intro

Can someone tell me why the old intro, which gave the amount of wind power generated as a % of world total as well as its growth rate, has been replaced with a number of gigawatts that is, for most people, completely without reference? Gee, 120GW, is that enough to run a car, a city, a country? Can we please restore the previous information that was useful for giving people a sense of perspective. TastyCakes (talk) 20:25, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

You may have noticed that once in a great while we get vandalism in the articles. Shocking,I know. I've reverted that particular change (back to March 4). WP:Be Bold and all that. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:48, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. TastyCakes (talk) 22:58, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

The following was removed: "However, the wind is not easy to predict and matching supply and demand of electricity is difficult. Conventional thermal power stations are still needed to back up the power supply. Most wind power projects are subsidised by government owing to the high capital costs of installation." For one thing, wind in general is predicted every day, and while it varies a lot, it is "non-dispatchable", meaning you have to take whatever is available, but matching supply and demand is continuously done, by turning on and off other sources, such as hydro. High cost is in itself never a reason for subsidy, if it was, Gucci handbags and Rolex watches would be subsidized. The reason it is subsidized is to encourage growth, and the reason you would want to do that is to stop global warming and pollution. 199.125.109.56 (talk) 21:08, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Given that electricity from various sources is almost completely indistinguishable to the consumer, the analogy with designer handbags is somewhat misleading. Some consumers (for example me) are willing to pay a little more for electricity to purchase green energy, but the renewable energy certificate mechanism is a weaker form of product differentiation than a conspicuous designer handbag provides.

Energy costs matter because they correlate inversely to some degree with what really matters: EROEI. If a particular source of energy has a very low EROEI, and requires different sources of energy for its production, then a heavy subsidy on that source of energy might (perversely) lead to a higher indirect consumption of those other sources of energy.

As to the predictability of wind, we cover that in Wind power forecasting. Wind is highly predictable on an annual basis, and even on a seasonal basis. On shorter time scales it becomes less predictable. However, we have barely scratched the potential for power consumption to adapt to the variability of renewable energy sources, via the Smart grid. Smart grids should benefit from Moore's law, which means the cost of adapting to power supply variability should decrease as long as computers improve. --Teratornis (talk) 17:08, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Fastest growing energy source

The statement that wind power is the world's fastest growing energy source needs to be qualified. It may be correct in terms of greatest added capacity, if China has stopped building a new coal power plant a week, or two, but it is not true in terms of rate of increase, as wind power is doubling every three years, about a 28%/year increase, but photovoltaics is doubling every two years, about a 48%/year increase. Photovoltaics is starting with a much smaller installed base, about 15.2 GWp in 2008 vs. an installed base of 121.188 GWp of wind power in 2008. The two are not directly comparable because each has a different capacity factor, but neglecting capacity factor, if the same rates continue solar will catch up with wind in 14.3 years, at which time each will provide about 5% of current energy consumption, with wind a little more because of the better capacity factor. If I might add a blatant plug here, this is no where near fast enough to make a significant dent either into global warming, or a replacement for collapsing oil production due to peak oil, so in fact each rate needs to be doubled from current growth rates. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 15:49, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Where does it say it's the world's fastest growing energy source? All I see in the intro is the statement that it is growing rapidly followed by it having doubled, which makes it clear they're talking about % increase, I think. On a related note, why was the factoid that caused so much argument before - that 70% wind penetration is realistic for the overall system - (see Archive 4) put into the introduction? I'm removing it. TastyCakes (talk) 15:57, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

It isn't in the intro. Do a text search for "fastest growing". If you check the reference, that is exactly what the reference says (WP quotes reliable sources even if they are incorrect!). I know that there is no penetration limit, so there really is nothing wrong with saying 70%, but you can see from the above that solar will surpass wind before wind ever reaches 70% in most markets (the above is total energy though, 70% is just electricity production). 199.125.109.33 (talk) 15:59, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Brazil seems to have fallen far behind their goal of reaching 1422 MW by 2008. The article notes that France also is not meeting their goal. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 16:20, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I've removed the fastest growing claim. TastyCakes (talk) 16:21, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

"Fastest growing" could refer to absolute or relative growth. For example, in 2008 the United States added more new wind power capacity than any other nation, but China more than doubled its wind power capacity for the fourth consecutive year. The U.S. had more absolute growth, China had more relative growth. (China will soon be the world wind power leader if it maintains its incredible percentage growth.) Thus any reference to "growth" must define the term. Percentage growth can be misleading for the reasons mentioned above, namely that very high percentage rates of growth aren't meaningful at first when the starting base is very small. As to whether and when solar power will catch up to wind power, that would seem to require solar power to overcome its cost disadvantage first. This seems unlikely due to basic physics:

• Wind turbines are inherently more efficient, being able to capture a high percentage of available power from the wind (Betz' law).
• Well-sited wind turbines typically have higher capacity factors than well-sited (terrestrial) solar cells, because the wind can blow around the clock, whereas the earth gets in the way of the sun at night.
  • The wind power density at a windy site can average (over 24 hours) as much as the peak solar power density at high noon at a sunny site.
• A wind turbine extracts power from its swept rotor area, which increases with the square of rotor diameter. Bigger wind turbines are also taller, allowing them to reach stronger winds. This gives wind turbines an economy of scale, since the swept area is mostly empty space, and the wind turbine cost increases more slowly than with the square of characteristic length. (Double the size, the power goes up more than four times, but the cost goes up less than four times. The strength of materials limits how far this can go, because eventually the Square-cube law kicks in. But evidently the largest currently available wind turbines aren't at the limit yet. Future materials with better strength-to-weight ratios may allow wind turbines to be larger still.)
• In contrast, solar cells have to fill an entire area with something solid (cells, mirrors, etc.). There can be manufacturing economies of scale, but no implementation economy of scale. Increase the area by x and the cost also increases by x.

In the long run, it would seem that solar power must eventually far exceed wind power simply because the solar resource is so much larger. However, I would be very surprised if solar gets ahead of wind before the best wind sites (such as North Dakota) are fully built out. And it is true that the current rates of growth in solar and wind power are nowhere near enough to meaningfully address global warming and peak oil concerns. Peak oil seems even more alarming, since the largest user of petroleum is the transportation sector, and transportation in countries like the U.S. depends on petroleum for more than 95% of its energy. Even if the U.S. were to carpet the Great Plains with wind turbines, that wouldn't help much with petroleum dependency until the vehicle fleet runs on something else (either natural gas per the Pickens Plan, biofuels, or electricity). Due to the very long time it will take to rebuild transportation, it seems that any unexpected decline in oil supply in the relatively near term would force a corresponding reduction in motorized transport, since the substitutes just aren't going to be there in large volume any time soon. For example, I recently read an estimate by an auto executive that the world will take 35 years to fully embrace electric vehicles. If that is true, the motoring world had better hope the alarmist predictions from the peak oil camp turn out to be overblown. --Teratornis (talk) 06:48, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

A related question I've wondered about recently, but haven't seriously tried to research yet: how does the annual consumption of electrical energy by electric vehicles compare to the annual production by wind turbines? I haven't seen a source for that yet. Neither have I seen anyone attempt to predict when the electric vehicles in a country such as the U.S. will consume more electricity than the country's wind turbines will produce. Given that petroleum is the fossil fuel with the lowest reserve-to-production ratio (and thus on schedule to become scarce first), and the fuel on which transportation critically depends, it would be interesting to track the growth of electric vehicle energy consumption and compare it to wind energy production. --Teratornis (talk) 06:56, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

If the alarmist predictions from the peak oil camp turn out to be true, it won't take 35 years to transition to alternative power sources for transportation (it didn't take that long to transition from horses). The biggest barrier to alternative fuels right now is the expectation that petroleum price surges, like the one we just had, are temporary. As for wind production vs. electric vehicle use, our article on the Chevy Volt says the battery has an effective capacity in use of 8.8 kWh, with a range on battery of 40 mi. At 20 mi per day, that's about 1.6 MWh/yr/car. With 150 million vehicles, that's 240 TWh/yr or about 27.4 gigawatts (do check my math). According to Yahoo news on Sunday, US wind farms had a combined capacity of 25,300 megawatts at the end of last year. That's presumably nameplate power, so you should divide by 4 or 5 for expected power and transmission losses, and I didn't account for trucks, but we're in the early stages of wind turbine buildout, so I'd say there is a good match. And as there are hardly any electric vehicles in operation, wind power is way ahead at the moment.--agr (talk) 12:50, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

P.S. One more advantage of wind over solar: A wind turbine's footprint on the ground is tiny, so land underneath the turbine can be put to other uses, such as farming or even solar production (sharing transmission capacity).--agr (talk) 13:04, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

• The ability for wind farms to continue functioning as actual farms or ranches gives wind a huge advantage, because it stabilizes traditionally unreliable agricultural income. However, the best sites for solar power plants are on desert land which isn't generally useful for much else, or on rooftops which are currently wasted space, so solar doesn't seem to be at a huge disadvantage. There probably won't be too many utility-scale combined wind and solar plants because the sunniest sites usually aren't very windy, and vice versa. Compare the U.S. wind map with the U.S. solar map.
• However, for off-the-grid small-scale applications, wind and solar can combine to offset each other's variabilities somewhat.
• I saw a video of a Solar updraft tower test site (Solar Tower Energy in Spain, Madrid on YouTube), which had the unexpected side effect of promoting plant growth underneath the plastic sheeting of the collector area. The mechanism was that water vapor condensed on the underside of the plastic sheeting at night and dripped back to the ground below. This allowed the ground beneath the sheeting to support much more plant growth than the surrounding barren desert. This might be one method for capturing solar energy while making the footprint area actually more productive for agriculture.
• If the really alarmist predictions from the peak oil camp turn out to be true, there won't be enough petroleum to fuel the build-out to alternative power sources. For example, even though the EROEI of a large wind turbine can be respectable (30 or higher), much of the energy invested currently has to be in the form of liquid fuel (mainly diesel) to power the trucks and cranes that move and erect the large turbine components. Until alternative power sources can directly build more alternative power sources, thereby overcoming their petroleum dependency, the transition to alternative power sources is vulnerable to disruption from an unexpectedly rapid petroleum supply decline. Granted, there is a huge amount of slack in the current U.S. system of moving people in low-occupancy automobiles. Just filling the empty car seats would reduce vehicle-miles enough to (possibly) absorb the initial decline in oil supply and free up enough oil to build wind turbines and to get serious about electrifying transport. But this might require vigorous government intervention in the market, e.g. a return to WWII-style gasoline rationing.

--Teratornis (talk) 17:53, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Solar seems to have taken an abrupt increase last year. The figures are always delayed but it seems that while wind increased by about 29% in 2008, to 121.188 GW, solar photovoltaics increased by maybe 76 to 94% depending on if you believe the install number of 5.95 GW or the total install figure of 15.2 GW over the 2007 total of 7.841 GW. Photovoltaics has to be combined with Solar thermal and Concentrating Solar Power to get a total for solar. Almost half the photovoltaics installed in the world in 2008 was installed in Spain, which is also building large CSP facilities. Here is a photo of an electric version of the Reva for India.[2] The article says that over 2,000 have been made:

Test Driving India's Electric Car

16 April 2009

On 16 April, representatives from REVA electric car company, which is based in Bangalore, India, brought two REVA vehicles to the IEA for Executive Director Tanaka to take a test drive. The REVA electric car, which was launched in 2001, was designed in California and manufactured in India. Over 2000 vehicles are on the road. The vehicle can go up to 80km on a single charge. Indian Ambassador to France, Hon. Ranjan Mathai (pictured here with Mr. Tanaka) came to the IEA for the test drive.[3]

The electric car article only has a total for the U.S., and only up through 2007. China still has the electric buses from the Beijing Olympics, and I think they were supposed to have built three thousand electric trash trucks for the Olympics as well.[4] Did they actually get built? 199.125.109.33 (talk) 19:43, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Adding to Arnold Reinhold's comments about electric vehicles. A large & sustained rise in the price of oil would stimulate the production of electric battery vehicles. What is really needed are suburban runabouts & commercial delivery vehicles with a range of say 70 km. Such vehicles are already practical. I envisage, in the US, the production of say 100 million suburban runabouts in 15 years. ---DavidJErskine (talk) 12:14, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Utilization of wind power should be changed

The title should be change to electricity production. Utilization of wind power is the idea of this whole article- to use wind power. Also it should not contain contry specific paragraphs and it should be an overview of the power industry with few words mention specific countries like German, US and China and direct to the specific countries.Calvingao (talk) 05:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

The relevant guidelines are WP:SIZE, WP:SUMMARY, and WP:SPLIT. I don't see a problem with having a summary overview of wind power in specific countries, but the question is where to put it. We have a Category:Wind power by country, which has the articles Wind power in Asia and Wind power in the European Union, but there is no "main" article specific to that category (which might be "Wind power by country" or "Wind power in the world"). The Wind power article (probably) gets more views and edits than any of the country-specific wind power articles, and might have a tendency to accumulate too much country-specific information. One oddity with Wind power#Utilization of wind power is that the paragraphs about individual countries do not appear in any particular order, nor is there any obvious rule about which countries get a mention. (Most notably, Germany gets remarkably short shrift considering its current rank as the world's second-largest wind power producer, and long previous tenure at the top position.) As the wind power industry grows globally, the summary section might become too large and might be suitable for splitting into its own summary article. The summary (whether as a section, or its own article) provides an overview which the individual "Wind power in (country)" articles do not provide. I.e., to get an idea of wind power around the world without such a summary, someone would have to read many country-specific articles and mentally compare them all. --Teratornis (talk) 20:24, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Environmental Effects Section

I recently deleted some of the criticisms in this section and my edit was reverted. Having personally visited a wind farm I can say from personal experience that noise is not a problem. The part about using natural gas I believe is also wrong. Jim Oswald is a biased source because he is trying to promote natural gas. TeH nOmInAtOr (talk) 05:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

• Did you take photos of this wind farm? We need more. See: commons:User:Teratornis/Gallery. --Teratornis (talk) 22:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

The part about natural gas is an economic concern, not an environmental issue. For example, T. Boone Pickens just scrapped his plans to build the Pampa 4,000 MW wind farm not because of environmental issues but because it is not as cost effective now that natural gas is cheaper (right now). This section is a summary section, and should only include a summary of the most important environmental effects from the environmental effects article. Anyone who comes up with an environmental effect should be putting it into that article, not this one. You know that noise is not a problem, I know that noise is not a problem, but it does come up often enough to briefly mention. Delphi234 (talk) 15:03, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a source for that? It is not mentioned in our Pampa Wind Project, Mesa Power LP or Pickens Plan articles. Rmhermen (talk) 19:24, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

"Mesa slows its agenda", indefinitely postponing anything after the 1000MW currently under construction.

—WWoods (talk) 16:38, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Renewable energy projects in general are getting cut back as a result of the financial crisis and the deflation in fossil fuel prices. Which means we are losing valuable time to prepare for an eventual economic recovery, when demand for fuel is likely to rebound (and slam into the ceiling of oil supply, which is or soon will be declining). I'm not sure how much difference the Mesa slowdown will make, though, since the backlog for getting wind turbines was already around three years. By the time Pickens could get his next batch of wind turbines, the economic and regulatory situation may be different. For example, the Obama energy plan may give wind power a huge boost. Global consensus may build for a Carbon tax as a result of increasingly dire evidence of accelerating Global warming. Concerned individuals may take matters into their own hands by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates. Wind power is currently the only source of renewable energy that can expand rapidly enough to make significant cuts in carbon emissions in the next ten years, with solar energy lagging about 5 to 10 years behind wind in terms of cost reduction and build-out. --Teratornis (talk) 22:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

"it does come up often enough" - noise doesn't seem to be a problem among the people who get paid to host wind turbines on their land. Wind turbine noise only seems to be a problem for some of the neighbors who aren't getting paid. I saw a video from Sweetwater, Texas in which one rancher smiled as he said something like "show me a wind turbine critic, and I'll show you someone who doesn't have any wind turbines." Of course most if not all of the neighbors regularly drive automobiles or trucks which radiate far more noise than modern wind turbines. Who ever mentions motor vehicle noise as a reason to ban motor vehicles? I suspect most of the objections to wind turbines are merely the result of their novelty. Once people get used to them, they will find wind turbines to be innocuous compared to the nuisances we all put up with (and inflict on each other) most every day. When automobiles were new, lots of people reacted negatively to them too, and in the case of automobiles they actually have good reasons to object. --Teratornis (talk) 22:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

"Danger to birds and bats is often the main complaint against the installation of a wind turbine." I can't believe this, surely the main complaint is the fact that they are an eye sore and spoil the countryside? Dave clark86 (talk) 11:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Discussion on Danish wind power export etc

This paper and associated email discussion might interest people.Engineman (talk) 14:09, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

 Hugh Sharman's paper on wind energy in Denmark

http://www.claverton-energy.com/energy-experts-library/downloads/windenergy.

The lengthy header is an email from someone , who appears to know nothing about Danish wind power but is nevertheless writing a book about it, with comment's from another person interspersed.Engineman (talk) 14:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The lengthy header is an email from Robert Bryce, who appears to know nothing about Danish wind power but is nevertheless writing a book about it, with Hugh Sharman, who does, comment's interspersed.Engineman (talk) 14:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC)Engineman (talk) 14:20, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

If a RS can be found, it would be interesting to document somewhere the wholesale price of electricity and the fact that it is negative sometimes (starting in October, 2009 in that particular grid via the above e-mail), maybe in one of the articles about the electricity grid. However, the rate being negative normally does not mean that power producers such as wind farms pay to put it on the grid, it means simply that utilities get paid for taking it from the grid. Normally power producers always get paid to put power onto the grid, even if the rate for using that same power is negative. In the case of wind farms, most of their power is taken at a guaranteed price on a Power Purchase Agreement. In Germany, for example, the FIT paid is independent of the wholesale market. One example, which keeps private the actual price paid, is a percentage of the hourly wholesale rate with a guaranteed minimum. A wind farm would never pay to provide power, as it would cost nothing to feather the turbines and reduce output to zero. However, the loss in production can never be recovered. Since wind is intermittent, you have to take all of it when it is available, and it is up to the grid operator to figure out what to do with it - ship it or store it for later. Hydroelectricity is a good buffer for wind, particularly in the form of pumped storage. The "paper", by the way, is little more than a discussion of wind power in Denmark and an advertisement for the VRB flow battery. 199.125.109.33 (talk)

Actually, in West Texas, wind farms are willing to pay to produce power, as long as the cost of doing so is less than the per kW-hr subsidies they receive.[5][6][7] I guess Danish wind farmers will soon be in the same situation.

—WWoods (talk) 18:40, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the actual contracts are proprietary, but it is simply a case of mismanaging the grid to not pay for the electricity generated. Enron became famous for costing the state of California $15 Billion to generate $2 million in profit for themselves by manipulating the grid. However, I see from that map that ERCOT does not control the windiest parts of the state, up by Lubbock and Amarillo. 199.125.109.49 (talk) 18:48, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

It's not only "the windiest parts of the state" that are desirable to control: geographical spread is necessary to "smooth" intermittence and to gain a better match with the demand profile. See Sindon 2005. Denmark is hampered because it's a small country; the wind speeds are moderate, but they match Danish patterns of demand rather poorly. That is why more than half is exported on the spot market, cheaply. Tony (talk) 08:09, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

is wind power reliable?

This article disputes the David Millborrow article claiming wind is reliable.

Is_Wind_Power_Reliable_by_D_Milborrow1.doc[8]

http://www.claverton-energy.com/energy-experts-library/downloads/windenergy

Engineman (talk) 14:43, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The intermittency of wind is well covered in the article (this article, Wind power). Being intermittent is very different than being unreliable, even though both mean that in one location it could stop almost at any time. The day the winds stop blowing anywhere on the planet will be the day the atmosphere is gone, meaning never. Most of the people who write papers about wind being unreliable do not understand the difference between intermittent and unreliable. Wind is extremely reliable, and extremely intermittent. The conclusion, or postscript, of the above paper is "Investment in wind energy is a luxury. It is like investing in a second parallel electricity generating system." Tell me something I haven't heard before, please. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 15:50, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure how you defone "reliable". Wind is unpredictable and cannot be relied to have a particular strength at any point in the future. Upper-level winds are supposed to be more consistent. Tidal energy is extremely reliable and extremely intermittent. We know exactly when the next tide will occur and have a very good idea of how large it will, and we can rely on those predictions.   Will Beback  talk  07:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

All this talk about large-scale wind power being "extremely intermittent" is just nonsense, see Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy#Wind power variability. See also Energy security and renewable technology and Brittle Power. Johnfos (talk) 08:10, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

To consider investment in wind power a "luxury", one would have to believe none of the following could be serious problems:

• Global warming
• Energy security
• Fossil fuel depletion

Either that or one would have to believe it is possible to solve all of the above problems without any significant use of wind power. Someone who could seriously believe either of those two propositions would seem to be uninformed. --Teratornis (talk) 18:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

• Yes, reliability, intermittence and predictability are three different issues, encapsulated nicely in this section. Can I say that any discussion in the article on the first two of these issues needs to be in relation to a particular geographical area. Sinden (and to a lesser extent, Milborrow, whom I don't trust scientifically as much, going by the surface of his text), have written in relation to the UK, which is well-placed for the economic use of wind power; but intermittency, reliability and capacity value (in relation to the ebb and flow of power deman) need to be modelled for every geographical area. It's research that is crying out to be done, so it's important that the article not claim universal facts on the basis of a study of one jurisdiction. Tony (talk) 08:05, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

anyone got an opinion on this?

[9] Tony (talk) 08:11, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Most likely, this wind turbine gives the same tradeoffs as other vertical axis wind turbines. After decades of trying, the wind industry has rejected vertical axis wind turbines for utility-scale power. They may still have a niche market in small wind. If you have reliable sources, you can write about this wind turbine somewhere appropriate. See:

• Small wind turbine
• Vertical axis wind turbine
• Savonius wind turbine
• Category:Vertical axis wind turbines - which shows some articles about individual makes; but check their talk pages to see if any have been the target of deletion attempts, so you know what you're getting into. Wikipedia has a small army of trigger-happy deletionists who eat questionable articles for lunch.

--Teratornis (talk) 19:27, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Brazil and renewable percentage

Am I missing something here? According to the article:

Another growing market is Brazil, with a wind potential of 143 GW.[72] The federal government has created an incentive program, called Proinfa,[73] to build production capacity of 3300 MW of renewable energy for 2008, of which 1422 MW through wind energy. The program seeks to produce 10% of Brazilian electricity through renewable sources.

But Itaipu alone produces 19% of Brazil's power (it used to be higher last time I checked, guess their energy demand has been climbing since then, but I digress). Is hydro power not considered renewable, is it an additional 10%, 10% ignoring Itaipu, or what am I missing?

121.90.186.160 (talk) 01:46, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay, answering to myself here. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak: http://www.eletrobras.gov.br/EM_Programas_Proinfa/default.asp has all the info (in Portuguese, which luckily I can speak). So, for what I gather there, the aim of the Proinfa is to provide an incentive for Alternative Power Sources, which are specifically defined as: Biomass, Wind Power, and Small Hydroelectric. According to the documents there, the aim is actually to split 3,300 MW equally between the three sources in the first step, so 1,100 MW would be for wind, I'm not sure where the 1,422 MW figure comes from. Here's the quote from the PHC guide (Small Hydroelectric, in Portuguese 'pequena central hidrelétrica'):

O PROINFA terá duas etapas de procedimentos distintos. Na primeira etapa, serão contratados 3.300 MW de potência instalada, mediante duas Chamadas Públicas com datas-limite de assinatura de contrato em 29 de abril e 30 de outubro de 2004. Tais contratações serão divididas igualmente entre aquelas fontes, cabendo, portanto, 1.100 MW para cada uma. O prazo para entrada em operação comercial dos empreendimentos contratados será 30 de dezembro de 2006.

Translation (quick and rough): The PROINFA will have two steps with different procedures. In the first step, 3,300 MW of installed power will be hired, after two Public Calls with a limit date for their hiring of April 29th and October 30th 2004. Those contracts will be equally divided between those [power] sources [Biomass, Wind, Small Hydroelectric], having, thus, 1,100 MW each. The date limit for the start of commercial operations of the hired enterprises will be December 30th, 2006.

So maybe that paragraph I originally asked about should be modified a bit to clarify what the Proinfa is actually trying to achieve? The power sources it specifically aims at, the amounts, and so on. (I'm not keen on editing a protected article myself, I'm guessing there's someone here who's been doing most of the work who'd be better suited for it, if you agree that is :D).

121.90.253.74 (talk) 01:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Hydroelectricity#Greenhouse gas emissions 2 mentions the release of methane from the anaerobic decomposition of biomass flooded by large tropical reservoirs, when nobody clears the forest from the reservoir area first. (Given the pace of deforestation anyway, I can't imagine how it would be difficult to bring in the loggers to clear the forest first.) This problem would seem especially relevant in Brazil. The Hydroelectricity article calls hydroelectricity a "renewable" energy source, which it clearly is, being a secondary form of solar energy (as is wind power). The possibility of methane emissions from newly flooded reservoirs in tropical forests might make some people reluctant to classify hydroelectricity as a renewable energy source, when what they are really trying to say is that at certain sites, a new hydro project might not be a low greenhouse gas emissions energy source. (Nuclear power has the opposite classification problem: it has very low greenhouse gas emissions, as good as any renewable energy source, but it is not strictly speaking renewable in its current form.) Thus the terminology may be getting sloppy due to public relations people taking over the discussion from engineers. People have invested heavily in touting renewable energy as a response to global warming, and things get muddy if a particular source of renewable energy generates some greenhouse gas emissions. The average person cannot easily follow these details, so the public relations people want to have a simple overarching slogan they can promote. In any case, large hydroelectricity projects may be essential to the wider use of highly variable sources such as wind and solar, because hydroelectric dams have tremendous built-in energy storage and can spin up from zero to full output in as little as one minute. This makes hydroelectricity extremely attractive for load balancing on grids that will need increasingly more of that as wind and solar power expand. --Teratornis (talk) 21:02, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

As far as how to correct the text about Brazil in the Wind power article, I suggest reading Energy policy of Brazil to make sure the discussion there is correct. More editors with knowledge of Brazil may be watching the Talk:Energy policy of Brazil page. The mention of Brazil in the Wind power article should be a summary of the hopefully more complete discussion in Energy policy of Brazil. Also see what is on the Portuguese Wikipedia on this topic; since you are bilingual, you can help to keep the two language versions synchronized. If you want to contribute, you should consider creating an account and making a single-user login so you can edit on the various language Wikipedia without having to log in separately. See also the links under WP:EIW#Translate. --Teratornis (talk) 21:07, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Last para in lead needs a good work-over

"Wind power, along with solar power, is non-dispatchable, meaning that for economic operation all of the available output must be taken when it is available, and other resources, such as hydropower, must be used to match supply with demand. The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power to supply a low proportion of total demand. Where wind is to be used for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs for compensation of intermittency are considered to be modest.[3]"

First, does ref. 3 cover all of these claims? Second, "non-dispatchable" needs to be explained to non-experts, and the current attempt doesn't convince me on logical grounds. "The intermittency ..." is a grand claim; who says it doesn't create problems when supplying only a low proportion of demand? And who says that the marginal costs for the compensation of intermittency are "modest"? It's not only intermittency, but the larger issue of "capacity value" to the grid, surely. See Sindon's excellent 2003 article on this matter in the UK. Tony (talk) 06:34, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Enh. The statement seems trivially true ... for sufficiently-low values of "seldom" & "low" and "moderate" & "modest". To really say something would require numbers, but that might be too much detail for the introduction.

—WWoods (talk) 17:56, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Also, the lead is intended to summarize the article, and normally does not require any references, as the references should be in the body. I agree, though, that it is trivially true. For example, if anyone knows anything about the grid, they would know that there is always a spinning reserve on hand to make up any demand that might come along - the grid does not store any energy, so has to produce the same quantity as the instantaneous demand. If you have a 10% reserve, and are getting 5% peak from wind, it is clearly impossible for wind to exceed the expected fluctuation. If you are getting 100% from wind, however, now you have to figure out where you are going to get your spinning reserve from when the wind dies down. I am no expert, but 20, 50 and even 100% spinning reserves are normal. If you already have a 100% spinning reserve, you can by definition get 100% from wind, as long, of course, as none of your spinning reserves fail. The moment that any of your spinning reserve goes on line, though, it is no longer a spinning reserve, and needs to be replaced by some other spinning reserve. That, however is not how anyone envisions utilizing renewable energy. Look at the combined power plant, to see what the model is for 100% renewable. It does not involve any spinning reserve from any non-renewable sources. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 05:14, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The word "modest" was the focal point of my uncertainty. Modest in relation to what? Tony (talk) 09:06, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

"Modest" does sound a bit WP:WEASEL. It would be nice to quantify that. However, as a sanity check we can observe that wind power is now the first or second-fastest growing source of new energy supply in many countries/regions of the world, with varied political systems (U.S., China, E.U., etc.). It seems unlikely that all these different countries would install so much wind power if it created seriously negative costs for handling intermittency. The Chinese in particular do not have the West's history of environmental movements, so it seems hard to believe they would install wind power if it were uneconomic - China has not hesitated to create some of the dirtiest cities in the world to pursue economic growth. And speaking of intermittency/variability, check out the power production curve of the Three Gorges Dam in File:Three gorges dam annual power output.JPG. While hydroelectricity is dispatchable on short notice and thus can follow load, on a seasonal scale the flow of most rivers will vary uncontrollably by large factors. In the case of Three Gorges, output varies from 4000 MW to almost 16000 MW with the season, which is like having 12 large nuclear power plants switching on and off. Since hydroelectricity is the oldest contributor to electrical grids, grid managers have been coping with supply variability for more than a century. Wind power introduces additional variability problems, but not a new type of problem. (Incidentally, Three Gorges alone outproduces (at 80 TWh/yr) the entire U.S. wind power industry (at 52 TWh/yr counting projects completed through 2008), but at 30% annual growth U.S. wind power should catch and surpass Three Gorges soon enough). Also, strictly speaking, some grids do store some energy, mostly with pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants (e.g., Raccoon Mountain, Dinorwig). To accommodate the variability of wind power at higher penetrations, building more pumped-storage plants would reduce the amount of fossil fuel burned to provide backup power. Pumped-storage has been around for decades and is mature technology. --Teratornis (talk) 17:28, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

solar energy

have removed reference to solar energy, since this articel is about wind power. Solar energy is in any case dispatchable in certain cases if it has a molten salt heat store which is readilly availalbe.Engineman (talk) 19:34, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

That of course is only one application of solar power - storage can be added to wind farms as well - there is a paper on increasing profit in a wind farm by storing some of the power and selling it when demand is greatest. The reference to solar energy I am sure was added to reflect the fact that environmentalists do not prefer wind power over solar power: "wind power is favoured by environmentalists". That sentence has been appropriately reworded to remove the need for adding the qualifier of wind (and solar) power are favoured by environmentalists, which was a statement, that though likely true, was not referenced. 199.125.109.33 (talk) 15:34, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Relative cost of electricity by generation source

Why has this paragraoh been removed - this article needs a paragraph giving the relative costs of competeing soources of power? Engineman (talk) 18:58, 28 July 2009 (UTC) When comparing renewable energy sources with each other and with conventional power sources three main factors have to be considered:

• Capital costs (including waste disposal and decomissioning costs for nuclear energy)
• Operating and maintenance costs
• Fuel costs (for fossil fuel and biomass sources, and which may be negative for wastes)

These costs are all brought together using discounted cash flow here. and here Inherently renewables are on a decreasing cost curve, while non-renewables are on an increasing cost curve. In 2009, costs are comparable between wind, nuclear, coal, and natural gas, but CSP - concentrating solar power, and PV - photvoltaics are somewhat higher.

There are additional costs for renewables in terms of increased grid interconnection to allow for diversity of weather and load, but these have been shown in the pan - european case to be quite low, showing that overall wind energy costs about the same as present day power.

This article already discusses production cost of wind power. This article is not the article on Economics of electric power which doesn't yet exist, and which I'd be pleased to help with. Reciting a few platitudes here doesn't really address the issued properly. I don't have the knowledge to write a proper article on economics. One must be careful to distinguish between cases involving hypothetical continent-spanning HVDC grids and what actually does get built.

It would be essential to get a good description of external costs (societal and environmental costs) and how they influence generation construction decisions. The wind power subsidies indicate that internal costs alone do not quite tip the scales toward wind power - the subsidies represent a rough-and-ready way to monetize the social value of wind compared to other power sources.

An analysis of the similarities between the early days of the commercial nuclear energy program and the early days of commercial wind power would be interesting, too. In both cases governments undertook R&D that private industry would have found too risky to do. Is the Price Anderson Act similar in effect to the Feed-in Tariffs ?

The economics of electric power article could discuss or link a lot of topics, such as Economic order of dispatch,Kelvin's Law, Time value of money, value of transmission losses, risk, load forecasting, the economic effect of unbundling transmission, generation, and distribution (paradoxically called "deregulation" even though there's usually even more regulations enforced), transmission congestion costs, and many others. What spins the generators is only one of the costs and usually not the sole decider of what generation gets built.

For example, if I need a gigawatt delivered at the corner of Yonge and Bloor in the summer of 2017, do I order a Frame 6 General Electric gas turbine, 200 windmills in Lake Ontario, a couple of CANDU 600s, an Areva PWR, a 2000 km HVDC transmission line and Conawapa Generating Station, 30 square km of solar cells, or a new coal-fired plant? Why? Show your work. Do not write on the back of the screen. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:18, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

• Particularly in the light of the absence of an article on the economics of wind power or of renewables more generally, I think it's entirely appropriate that this article present the basics. It can be turned into summary style when such a daughter article is created. Tony (talk) 14:36, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I think that the para withymanski deleted is a perfectly acceptable start for comparing the published costs of competing sources. Particularly the one by Millborrow. I intend to reinstate the article unless you can come up with some better reasons.Engineman (talk) 20:41, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Queries about the text

In 2008, wind power produced about 1.5% of worldwide electricity usage; and is growing rapidly, having doubled in the three years between 2005 and 2008.

Wind power doubled? (Seems vague). Or that 1.5% figure doubled (from 0.75%)?

Can someone clear this up?

Looks perfectly clear to me, 0.75% of world electricity in 2005, 1.5% in 2008, doubled share due to wind. What does the reference say?

--Wtshymanski (talk) 15:28, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Where wind is to be used for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs for compensation of intermittency are considered to be modest.

This seems to be a rather sweeping claim; the reference appears to be based on one summary paper, Adelaide, 2006, based on a slender sample. I suggest this claim be toned down. Tony (talk) 14:50, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Read on in the article near Wind power#Penetration and the penetration/costs issue is beaten to death. The statement is already considerably more mealy-mouthed than it was a couple of years ago in this article. What's a "suppary paper" ? The statement is trivially true at the limit; a 10 kW turbine on my rooftop connected to the MRO grid isn't going to cause any trouble, but the island of Corfu has different problems. The lead should summarize the article and probably shouldn't even have footnote references. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:28, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

The recently added 3 papers are looking at 40% wind energy generated in the UK, not capacity - that is considered moderate and the costs are a few percent extra.

The Czisch paper is looking at 70% for europe and shows there is no extra costs.

Economies of scale in the production of wind turbine components

The article fails to mention the effect of large scale production of the components of wind turbines. China has now emerged as the factory of the world, & a huge increase in the production of the components of wind turbines will eventually lead to a sharp reduction in the price. Economies of scale apply to manufactured items such as cars & paperclips. The economics of wind power is dominated by the purchase price of wind turbines. ----DavidJErskine (talk) 12:21, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a reliable source that quantifies the further economy of scale possible with wind power? Wind turbines already incorporate a number of off-the-shelf components such as motors and gearboxes, which aren't likely to get much cheaper. Structurally, wind turbines are mostly steel, concrete, and fiberglass, and the cost of these materials is unlikely to drop much since the industries that make them are mature. A ton of steel or concrete has had a largely stable price for decades. Incidentally, for the past 100 years, the cheapest source of power has been large-scale hydroelectricity. Despite 100 years of scientific and technological progress, and economies of scale, no other power source beats hydro. Not coal, not nuclear, and certainly not wind nor solar. I doubt that will change for the next 25 years at least. Even nuclear fusion might not turn out to be cheaper than hydro, due to the low energy density of plasma and the need for high-tech equipment to contain it. The only reason we build any other kind of power plants besides hydro is the limited number of suitable hydro sites. --Teratornis (talk) 18:42, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

China is also building lots of hydro plants, so any cost reduction resulting from Chinese manufacturing prowess will apply to hydro as well as wind, most likely maintaining the cost advantage of hydro. According to Hydroelectricity#Economics, the Three Gorges Dam will reach economic break-even after 5 to 8 years of full generation. The dam may operate for a century or more, at very low operating cost, which means it will be like the world's largest money-making machine for a long time. In contrast, China's wind farms will all require replacement in about 20 years. This is not argument against wind, just an observation that wind will never be cheaper than hydro. It all comes down to energy density: falling water packs a lot more energy into a smaller volume than typical surface winds. Capturing wind power requires a lot more "stuff" and all that stuff costs more. --Teratornis (talk) 18:58, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I think we're not comparing unequal issues here. I'm no expert, but I'd assume that the largest expense with hydropower would be in constructing the dam, not in building the turbines. Even a project as vast as the Three Gorges only requires 34 turbines, and IIRC hydropower turbines are always custom built for each installation. Further, while wind turbines may cause some noise pollution and kill some birds, there is no other external cost. A large dam has many external costs, chiefly involving the flooding of large areas that become unusable, and in the case of Three Gorges the loss of tourism, plus a losss in fisheries. So the value of the electricty gained has to offset by the loss of production from the land and the other opportunity costs. Further, the cost to remove old wind turbines is probably fairly small, but the cost of removing a silted-up dam is very large. Finally, a catastrophic failure of a wind turbine may kill a few people and demolish a house or two, but a failure of a dam can kill many people at once and wipe away entire villages or even cities. The bottom line is that every form of electricity production has costs, and hydropower has many external costs that need to be accounted for if it's to be compared to wind power.   Will Beback  talk  20:43, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

The direct cost of hydropower includes the cost of building the dam, just as the cost of wind power includes the cost of building wind turbine foundations and so on. Considering external costs can change the picture, and that factors into "the limited number of suitable hydro sites" ("suitable" means "where the external costs are tolerable" in addition to the engineering practicality and so on). For example, near where I live, the Ohio River has bluffs about 100m high, and damming the river to that height would allow for an impressive hydro plant, but the resulting reservoir would flood at least a million people and property worth an astronomical sum. So it's a non-starter. I was commenting on the original poster who mentioned economies of scale that might result from Chinese wind turbine manufacture - the Chinese are not going to build wind turbines for less manufacturing cost than they build hydro plants. I can't speak for Three Gorges, but many hydro dams in North America increase tourism by impounding lakes that are popular for recreation. However, tourism itself is extremely polluting and in most cases burns up the scarcest fossil fuel (petroleum). When calculating the "cost" of lost tourism, one must account for the immense external costs of tourism (George Monbiot and David J. C. MacKay, among others, have been arguing that long-distance jet travel is one of the least profitable ways to burn fossil fuel). And as to whether wind power has "no other external costs" besides some noise pollution and some dead birds, I happen to agree, but wind-NIMBYs sharply differ. Opinion polls evidently show majority support for wind power, but some small percentage of people seem extremely bothered by the sight of wind turbines. I suspect most of them are probably also climate change deniers to some extent, but we have a lot of those too. The bottom line is any form of large-scale energy development has somebody complaining about it, as we all know. --Teratornis (talk) 21:39, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Good points. There are two issues, costs in money, and environmental costs. You're right that tourism is polluting but it also brings in money. The Three Gorges was a toourist destination, though I dn't know how popular it was. Regarding the costs of building dams versus wind turbines, I'm not sure how we can say "the Chinese are not going to build wind turbines for less manufacturing cost than they build hydro plants" since there are so many factors to calculate. Wind turbines require fairly small concrete pads and simple dirt roads for placement and maintenance. According to the article, the Three Gorges project used "27,200,000 cubic metres (35,600,000 cu yd) of concrete, 463,000 tonnes of steel, enough to build 63 Eiffel Towers, and moved about 102,600,000 cubic metres (1.342E+8 cu yd) of earth." The environmental costs of creating that much concrete and steel, and of moving all that dirt, must be significant. But gettig back to the original point, it's reasonable to assume that there would be economies of scale in building thousands of identical wind turbines that wouldn't be found in building dozens of custom-made water turbines. Also, since there is a growing demand for wind turbines, and since they require relatively little infrastructure, there will doubtless be many manufacturers, while large water turbines are probably only made by a few companies. However the bottom line is that we're just disussing our opinions here. Without sources on this topic we can't add anything to the article.   Will Beback  talk  21:59, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Hydroelectricity has been the cheapest source of electrical power for over a century. Google and you will see. Building a million wind turbines won't change that, because hydro is already far down a similar learning curve. Economy of scale also favors building big generators over small ones, which is part of why wind power has gotten less expensive over the past 30 years. If building lots of wind turbines lowered their cost, we'd still be putting up 50 kW wind turbines by the thousands to make a wind farm, instead of a few dozen megawatt-class units. You don't get much economy of scale in building lots of wind turbines because the cost is dominated by material cost - steel, fiberglass, concrete, copper, etc. Hydro generators are bigger than wind generators could ever be, so they enjoy a scale advantage that wind is unlikely to match. Hydro is so cheap that it justifies shipping aluminum ore long distances to aluminum plants built near hydro plants. It's cheaper to export hydroelectricity at intercontinental distances in the form of aluminum, to regions that have to use more expensive sources of electricity (i.e., anything else). Hydro has an inherent advantage over wind: far higher energy density. Capturing a given amount of power from wind requires more "stuff" than capturing the same amount of power from a good hydro site. (Calculate the amount of stuff it takes to build wind turbines equivalent to Three Gorges - do you know how many wind turbines that is?) Hydro plants are more efficient, since water is nearly incompressible. This allows a hydro turbine to extract about double the percentage of the energy from falling water than a wind turbine can extract from moving air (see Betz' law). Hydro has the considerable advantage of built-in energy storage, which allows hydro to follow load. This makes hydro one of the most desirable power sources to have on the grid - so desirable, in fact, that pumped hydro storage plants are economical even though they are net energy losers. Since wind power is uncontrollably variable, you have to factor in an extra cost to provide energy storage, demand management, or backup power. The most economical form of grid energy storage is - guess what - pumped hydro storage. It's hard for wind power to be cheaper than hydro when wind power needs hydro to back it up. (This is not an argument against wind - in fact wind farms work well with hydro plants because few hydro plants have enough river flow to run at full output continuously. When the wind blows, the hydro dams can store up valuable water.) Hydro plants are also far more durable - some have been in continuous operation for a century, whereas wind turbines only have a design life of 20 years. Three Gorges is probably going to keep running after China's wind farms have been replaced five times! Finally, consider that people were able to build hydroelectric plants in the late 1800s using incredibly primitive technology, whereas wind power only recently became practical for generating grid electricity (requiring advanced materials, sophisticated computer control, etc.). If people could do something 100 years ago, it had to be easier, and in the world of energy, easier generally equates to cheaper. Energy technology is different than computer technology where Moore's law applies. With computers, we are used to technology completely changing the game rules every few years. Nothing comparable happens in energy. Technology can increase the number of energy sources we can tap, but it rarely makes a new source cheaper than an old source was. Wind and solar costs have declined substantially over the past 30 years, but they started off costing 10 to 50 times more than than the mainstays of hydro, nuclear, coal, oil, and gas. Further cost reductions run into diminishing returns. For example, wind turbines have gotten cheaper as they have grown larger, but there are limits to how large wind turbines can be. Wind power will probably become cheaper than fossil fuels at some point, but only because fossil fuels will become scarce. Hydro is also renewable so it doesn't deplete on a human timescale. Similar cost relationships apply to other types of energy, for example petroleum and biofuels. Humans have known how to make ethanol for 5000 years, and use it as an engine fuel for 100 years, but hardly anyone used it because petroleum was cheaper. 100 years of incredible progress in science and technology did not change the inherent cost advantage of petroleum over ethanol - people are burning ethanol because the supply of oil isn't keeping up with the demand for liquid fuels. People burned petroleum before resorting to ethanol because petroleum was originally the low-hanging fruit. Similarly, people built hydro dams before wind turbines because hydro is the low-hanging fruit of renewables. --Teratornis (talk) 06:49, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

If you really want to see the cost contrast, compare micro hydro to small wind turbines. The rule of thumb for living off the grid is that you only consider wind or solar if you don't have an adequate micro hydro site. Also, buying the most efficient appliances money can buy is almost always a better investment than paying for more generating capacity of any kind, and this shows up clearly in off-the-grid homes because the owners see the capital costs of their micro power plants directly. (The fact that ordinary grid customers often fail to buy the most efficient appliances smells like a market failure.) This cost relationship is highly unlikely to change, at least not in the lifetime of anyone alive today: efficiency < hydro < wind < solar. It might change if someone invents a solar cell that you can buy in liquid form and paint onto a surface, for the same cost as a can of paint. Or maybe if the nanotech folks invent a solar cell that self-replicates like grass. But if they could do that, they could also make self-replicating hydro plants which would retain the physics advantages of hydro over solar. --Teratornis (talk) 07:08, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

(undent) More about Three Gorges: according to our article, Three Gorges alone outproduces (at 80 TWh/yr) the entire U.S. wind power industry (at 52 TWh/yr counting projects completed through 2008). The dam is projected to produce 100 TWh/yr when the reservoir is full. The total project cost was just under $30 billion. U.S. wind power investment has been higher than that. The addition in 2008 of 8,500 MW of nameplate capacity cost $17 billion. Big hydro costs less per watt of nameplate capacity than wind power currently, typically has a somewhat higher capacity factor, and hydroelectric plants can last several times as long as wind turbines. Further developments in wind turbines may lower their costs, but it's going to be hard for wind to catch big hydro. We build wind farms because we don't have enough suitable hydro sites. On the negative side for hydro, Three Gorges displaced more than one million people - I don't think that would be acceptable in a country like the U.S. --Teratornis (talk) 01:59, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

I wasnt comparing wind power with hydro power, nor comparing large wind turbines with small ones. Wind power only got moving, say, 20 years ago, & the global potential for wind power, especially on coast lines with good wind conditions, is enormous. I was comparing the economics of wind power now to the economics of wind power in the future, assuming huge expansion in the industry across the world. If this huge expansion takes place, there will be economies of scale relative to the position now. --DavidJErskine (talk) 08:40, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

"You don't get much economy of scale in building lots of wind turbines because the cost is dominated by material cost - steel, fiberglass, concrete, copper, etc."

Nope. Wind turbines are value added products. Professor Per Peterson lists a few material usage data points in this presentation. [10]. Peterson's old data agrees with current Vestas reports that I don't have handy.

Commodity prices have driven wind turbine prices up to some degree but this effect has been greatly exaggerated. A simple spreadsheet tracking commodity prices along with material usage will verify this. Price increases have mainly been driven by supply chain bottlenecking. Bearings in particular have been a pinch point.

I reviewed the construction specs on a $3,000/kW run-of-river project about 6 months ago. Hardly cheap. BC Hydro intends to buy a stake in Waneta for $5,000/kW. [11]. If wind can get costs back down to 2004 levels or lower it will stack up pretty well against new North American hydro projects. Mrshaba (talk) 05:27, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Comparative costs

please don't arbirarily delete this paragrpah again. Costs are pretty meaningless unless they compare other power sources on s aimilar basis which the cited reference clearly attempt to do. All the otehr later paragraphs merely obsucre the picture.Engineman (talk) 15:00, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Every paragraph on the Wikipedia can be arbitrarily deleted at any time - notice the warning under the "save" button ? This section still needs a lot of work. It's not good style to say "The results you need to see are here and here" and point at a couple of off-wikipedia URLs. Read the references, suummarize their arguements here, then cite the references in support of the summary. I think this is way too sketchy a treatment to be credible. How about some real refeernces to textbooks discussion econoics of electric power production? A windpower advocacy site is going to be seen as a poor quality reference. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:49, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Claverton is not a wind power advocacy site.; It is a discussion group for professionally qualified people, many, but by no means all who support wind power on the basis of advancing actual facts. the paragraph may well need some work, but it is a start. references comparing differnt power source costs are clearly needed for this article to be useful.Engineman (talk) 22:40, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Even if Claverton were a wind advocacy site, that is irrelvanet since the article is merely reporting on three independent authored, by experts, one is the National Grid of Uk, and one is an ex CEGB expert, and Pyry is an independant consultancy organisation, and they all pretty much agree.

Move editorializing to talk page and out of article comments

Main article Economics of electricity When looking at the costs of electric power, competing sources may be compared on a similar basis of calculation. When comparing renewable and conventional power sources several internal cost factors have to be considered:

• Capital costs (including waste disposal and decomissioning costs for nuclear energy)

All plants need decomissioning costs if they are to internalize all costs.

• Operating and maintenance costs
• Fuel costs (for fossil fuel and biomass sources, and which may be negative for wastes)

what about water rights for hydro plants? Payments to landowners for siting of turbines ?

• Expected annual hours run
• what about annual load factor?
• what about transmission costs?
• what about repowering costs?
• required investor ROI to sustain project
• subsidies or special depreciation and tax allowances
• interest during construction, financing costs are huge factors
• environmental hearings, licences, permits
• what about external costs, monetizing value of pollution
• value of carbon offset credits if any
• negawatts, conservation
• overhaul/improve old plant vs construct new facilities
• grid services value such as capacity credits, energy credits, frequency control, reactive power, voltage control, black start

--Wtshymanski (talk) 02:27, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Please complete the table

Annual Wind Power Generation (TWh) and total electricity consumption(TWh) for 10 largest countries.
This table is still incomplete, althrough we are well into 2009. Please complete it if you can find the source and the number.Calvingao (talk) 15:43, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

The "Wind Power" and "Total Power" columns actually list energy values in TWh. That's somewhat annoying. Or maybe it implies TWh/yr, which would be an odd unit of "annual power". Anyway, I'll look around for sources. Presumably whatever sources people used for previous years will have been updated by now. --Teratornis (talk) 04:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

I checked the sources for the older table values and they haven't been updated yet. It seems some of the sources for world electricity consumption use older years for some countries, "estimated" values, etc. Perhaps the whole world isn't running on one centralized power meter that we can simply read off each month. I found some figures for overall wind power generation for 2008 from the World Wind Energy Association but they seem to be running a bit higher than the values one would get by extrapolating from earlier years on the table. Oh well, anyone else can have a crack at it. The table might always be running a year or two behind. --Teratornis (talk) 07:02, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Aesthetics!=Environmental Effect

The last section in Environmental Effects seems misplaced. Whether the construction of a windfarm has been delayed due to concerns for aesthetics or some village finds the turbines impressive looking is not exactly an environmental effect. Aesthetics probably deserve mentioning somewhere but not here... SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 21:52, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Environmental effects of wind power covers the visual footprint of wind farms. Modern wind turbines are big, and getting bigger. Their visibility is one of their greatest environmental impacts, since wind turbines have almost no other environmental impacts, compared to other types of power generation. Visual footprint is an environmental impact, much as sound generation would be, if wind turbines were especially noisy. However, unlike other types of power generation which impact the environment in objectively measurable ways (such as with carbon dioxide, particulates, and waste heat), the visual footprint of wind farms does not affect all people equally. Some people like to look at wind turbines, most people don't pay much attention to them, and a few people find them highly objectionable. The visibility of wind turbines and how various people react to seeing them is pretty much the whole issue with wind turbines. Most of the other concerns (ice throw, birds, etc.) are probably being overblown by wind power opponents who really only care about having to look at wind turbines. For example, if wind power opponents actually cared about birds, they would be campaigning against the real threats to birds, which are cars, cats, and anthropogenic global warming. --Teratornis (talk) 07:12, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Should the article not mention that moving turbine blades can sometimes cause problems with radio and particularly television reception in the vincinity ? 86.112.253.185 (talk) 00:46, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

There'd have to be a source, but if it's significant then it should be included.   Will Beback  talk  01:08, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Spin out economics and electricity generation?

The electricity generation section could perhaps be spun out as Wind power grid integration, to make this article a little more compact. A very short summary would be left here. Similarly, until someone writes the Economics of electric power article, perhaps all the economics could be spun out into Economics of wind power with a one-line summary left here. We did this with history a while ago, and it's one strategy for keeping this article under 100 kb. Any thoughts? --Wtshymanski (talk) 03:25, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Thats a possiblity, but it seems to me that a lot of the stuff in the article is far to detailed - a sort of collections almost of random facts for and agains wind energy.

i would expect users of the article to get some quick conclusions and over view and at the moment the published authoritative references, all show that wind power even including the externalities is on a par with the costs of other power sources - within the limits of accuracy anywayl. so why does there have to be some much stuff about the detail?09:38, 19 August 2009 (UTC) Engineman (talk) 09:38, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Starting on Wind power grid integration but it needs a lot of reorganizing to stand on its own. Don't want to cut this section out of wind power till it's at least got some coherency. --Wtshymanski (talk) 03:06, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Neutrality and lack of independent sources

"Economics and feasibility"

I think the section has a number of problems:

• it refers to several sources that have a vested interest in advocating wind power. This undermines the neutrality of the article.
• there is a lack of high-quality, independent sources cited on the economics of wind power.
• in my opinion, the existing economic description is biased in favour of wind.

I've added the new sub-section "full costs and lobbying" to try and counter some of this bias. Enescot (talk) 20:22, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I find the additions more problematic than the original section. The cite from Helm is polemical. And the House of Lords Economics Committee is, despite its impressive title, not a reliable source. Its reports on energy related topics are largely driven by Lord Lawson, a prominent climate "sceptic".JQ (talk) 07:47, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Despatchability

Why has the edit saying that wind is dispatchable been reverted? ?It is self evident, that in any concentration, but particularly high concentrations, wind farms can be contrained of to a certain extent, That is obvious in and of itslef to it doesnt need a reference.Engineman (talk) 22:32, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Sure, the power output can be constrained down from the total available amount of power at any one given time. The term dispatchability does not only refer to the ability to constrain the power output down - it also requires that a generation source be able to be turned up (dispatched) on command. WTGs, being intermittent and dependent on the wind blowing, are not arbitrarily able to be dispatched. This is stated clearly in the refs I have added, and at Dispatchable generation and Intermittent energy source - I could also find some power systems textbooks that back this up also, if you like.... --Digitiki (talk) 23:13, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for removing the references I added. Did you read them? I took the liberty of reading the reference you just cited (the link you provided was broken, btw). This is a direct quote from it:

″Wind generation, by contrast, is not dispatchable under the existing market and does not bid into the market." - page 11

The context of the article is regulation of the energy market of Ireland. The line quoted above is the closest mention I could find referring to the dispatchability of wind generation, and it directly contradicts the edit you used it as a citation for. I don't understand the reasoning here - please explain yourself. The term 'dispatchable generation' is taken to mean (by every reference and text I've read, for what weight that has) a power source that can be started and changed at any time. Wind does not have that ability.

Perhaps this should just be spun over into Wind power grid integration (when it's ready) along with the generation section? This much detail seems like too much for the top section as it is, though I'm not really clear on that kind of thing. --Digitiki (talk) 03:29, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

See WP:LEAD for guidelines about the top (or "lead") section. The wind itself is not dispatchable. A sufficiently desperate community of people could make wind turbines somewhat more dispatchable by building a large excess of them, widely dispersed. Then they could spill wind when the total available power exceeded demand. With a large excess of wind turbines, the curve of available power would still undulate up and down at random, but around a higher average power. Whenever available power exceeded demand, the excess available wind power would be "dispatchable". I doubt this is very meaningful in most of the real world yet, where wind power penetrations tend to be low, and wind power having high investment cost isn't the first choice for dispatchable generation. It makes more sense to dispatch a power source that has relatively low capital cost and high fuel cost, like gas turbines, or low fuel cost and a low capacity factor but high dispatchable capacity, like hydro, which the operator will want to sell at the highest spot price (i.e. during peak demand). I agree this belongs in Wind power grid integration. If someone invents cheap high-capacity high-temperature superconducting power cables, a global power grid might be feasible, and that would allow multiple continents and time zones to smooth out their variations in demand and supply. For example, Argentina could sell wind power to the US during the northern hemisphere summer, when the wind is at its winter maximum in the southern hemisphere. Australia could develop its enormous wind, solar, and geothermal resources and export the electricity to China. I don't expect to see that during my lifetime. But we could see the first steps. --Teratornis (talk) 01:19, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Old thinking about power grids

I suggest e need to move on - wind is growing world wide at 30% per annum, and you can't necessarily discuss large scale wind using only the old concepts of grid management that were applied to conventional plant and somehow point to their inabili9ty to fit into the old paradigms as an inherent fault.

This is a definition of Dispatchability from the article on Intermittent energy source -

Dispatchability [12] or maneuverability is the ability of a given power source to increase and/or decrease output quickly on demand. The concept is distinct from intermittency; maneuverability is one of several ways grid operators match output (supply) to system demand.[16]

Constraining off wind power seems to fit into this definition perfectly.

The fact that wind is not actually despatched in Ireland doesn't undermine the point that wind is or could be despatchable in the correctly designed markets and in high penetrations.

Putting the issue of despatchablity in the lead paragraph is a distraction or red herring - and should probably be in a detail lower down, since it is not of crucial importance. Czisch has shown that a European supergrid,[13] allowing the connection of distant grids, and utilizing existing European hydro - 6 weeks full load output storage, means that wind can provide power at todays prices. there is no need to connect Argentina to US - US already spans 6 time zones and has existent long distance HVDC - it just needs to be built up. Thus the non despatchability of wind or otherwise is not the killer defect that seems to be implied.

All plants have limits on their despatchability - OCGT may take 20 minutes to meet full output, but a wind turbine can be de constrained off (or on in seconds and minutes. With sufficient concentration of wind turbines the despatchable power, in MW will obviously equal say a 50 MW OCGT. OCGTs cannot be repeatedly stopped and started whereas wind can be repeated constrained and de constrained.Engineman (talk) 10:41, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Wind power devices

Some time ago, the article wind energy conversion system was deleted. The aim of this article was to make clear that both purely mechanical aswell as electricity generation wind harvesters exist. Aldough I can understand why it has been deleted (a search with a search engine for these terms, aldough acurate, generate little results). However, aldough I thus don't mind this article is deleted, the images I made to clarify this were removed aswell. Perhaps that a gallery, or better yet a new section at this article, is thus made instead. The images are:

• 
  A panemone bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A savonius bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A ground sailor bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A cretan bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A thai bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A Darrieus bladed rotor WECS
• 
  A cambered plate bladed rotor WECS

KVDP (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Gallery pages are welcome on Commons. See Commons:COM:EIC#Gallery. There is a Wind power gallery there. You could expand that page with another section, or create a separate gallery page for the images you uploaded. See for example a gallery I am (slowly) working on in my userspace:

• Commons:User:Teratornis/Wind turbines on public display

There is a Small wind turbine article and a Commons:Category:Micro-generation wind turbines. --Teratornis (talk) 06:06, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Removed statement

I removed the following statement from the article:

A series of detailed modelling studies which looked at the Europe wide adoption of renewable energy and interlinking power grids using HVDC cables, indicates that the entire power usage could come from renewables, with 70% total energy from wind at the same sort of costs or lower than at present. Intermittency would be dealt with, according to this model, by a combination of geographic dispersion to de-link weather system effects, and the ability of HVDC to shift power from windy areas to non-windy areas.

...because it was not supported by the two provided references.

The first reference claims that 20% (not 70%!) of electricity could be generated from wind without major changes to the grid and therefore without cost increases.

The second reference is far less credible, since it reads like a persuasive essay complete with exaggerations of various kinds. However, even that reference claims that average prices, with 70% of energy from wind, is "relatively close" to current costs, and lower than the price of electricity on a particular day on an energy exchange in Germany.

Neither study completely supports the statement, and the more credible study comes nowhere close.

Also, there was not a "series of detailed modelling studies" to support the statement. Instead, the second reference has a simulation in which different sets of parameters are fed in to generate results for different scenarios. However that is not a series of studies (which implies some kind of academic consensus) but a series of simulation runs by a single set of researchers for one paper.

I'm not sure we should produce any statement from the 2nd reference alone. That reference appears to be discrepant with others and is cited far less than the 1st. I'm not sure the conclusions of the 2nd paper are generally accepted, in which case it would be undue weight to present it as if it were a series of detailed studies. Twerges (talk) 06:02, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds about right. Greglocock (talk) 10:22, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Added costs of standby power

Someone deleted the mention of added costs if standby power is retained to back up wind power. It is axiomatic that doubling the number of power generation units, for the same output, will increase electrical costs. This time I have used an actual quote from the Telford report - proving that standby power and balancing loads will increase costs. The sentence now reads:

Wind power advocates argue that these periods of low wind can be dealt with by simply restarting existing power stations that have been held in readiness or interlinking with HVDC, but this would increase electrical prices due to standby power and load balancing costs.

I would be grateful for no more deletions of this. Narwhal2 (talk) 20:47, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

What size is the cheapest?

The article doesn't tells what is the best choice, in terms of KW/US$. A big wind turbine or some smaller wind turbines, must be bought and installed? I read in a Cuban book that turbines at about 200-300 KW are the best in terms of price for each KW, but the book was writen more than 20 years ago. What size of wind turbine is the best in terms of price today? Agre22 (talk) 16:25, 19 December 2009 (UTC)agre22

There is no simple answer to this question. In principle, the the power potential of a wind turbine is determined by the square of the rotor diameter, therefore larger turbines are cheaper in terms of $/kW. Yet there are some caveats. First, there is a technical challenge in creating larger turbines, resulting in much higher cost. Wind turbine manufacturers are working hard on solving these issues, and because they are successful, turbines have become bigger over time. REpower for example, is now building turbines with a capacity of 5MW. Second, there is a logistical challenge. There are limits to what size turbines can be transported, especially concerning onshore wind farms requiring transport by truck. This limit is different per country, and even per project. GNOJED3891 (talk) 16:17, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Amendment to Dinorwig sentence

I am not happy with the following statement.

Thus, the 2 GW Dinorwig pumped storage plant adds costs to nuclear energy in the UK for which it was built, but not to all the power produced from the 30 or so GW of nuclear plants in the UK.

Firstly, Dinorwig affects ALL power suppliers in the UK, not just nuclear power plants.

Secondly, Dinorwig (First Hydro) would deny that this plant 'increases costs', rather it decreases costs. Without Dinorwig, base-load suppliers would have to supply (and possibly waste) much higher capacities of electricity to cover electrical demand increases. The presence of Dinorwig evens out demand peaks, and allows base-load suppliers to run more efficiently.

I propose that this sentence is amended to:

The 2 GW Dinorwig pumped storage plant in Wales evens out electrical demand peaks, and allows base-load suppliers to run their plant more efficiently. Although pumped storage power systems are only about 75% efficient, and have high installation costs, their low running costs and ability to reduce the required electrical base-load can save both fuel and total electrical generation costs. Narwhal2 (talk) 11:51, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, please fix it. Editors on Wikipedia sometimes write as if electric power generation companies are managed no better than someone's personal checkbook - when in reality whole careers of hundreds of people are spent in analyzing the least-cost alternatives for operating a system. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:22, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

The actual cost increase comes from the non-dispatchability of most demand for electricity, namely that most people want to be awake and consuming electricity during the same hours of the day. --Teratornis (talk) 08:31, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Recent additions

I've reverted some recent additions [14] which were either unsourced, poorly sourced, or not quite right. For example, wind turbine prices have actually decreased in recent times, see Wind Turbine Prices Move Down, Shows New Price Index from NEF. The 21% capacity factor figure is for Europe only, not Europe and America as stated, see Capacity factor of wind power realized values vs. estimates.

When writing about contentious issues, it is best to use reliable published sources and avoid unpublished PowerPoint presentations such as this: [15]. Citations should include relevant page numbers of reports and articles wherever possible. Johnfos (talk) 20:39, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the deletions, and the rationale for them. The cost of electricity is a complex issue, involving a non-linear mix of fixed costs, capital costs, and operating costs (some sources include fuel costs here). The WP article that purports to cover the topic more generally (was in the "See also" portion of the deleted text) -- Relative cost of electricity generated by different sources -- has many of the same problems and could really use a look by a good copyeditor and/or experienced WP editor generally. N2e (talk) 23:19, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Don't you think it would have been better to try and edit the stuff than deleting it outright? Greglocock (talk) 05:45, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced and poorly sourced material must go. Johnfos (talk) 06:51, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, just a suggestion, perhaps you need to go back and reread the three pillars, which say no such thing. refs can be added, poor arguments can be improved. Greglocock (talk) 06:56, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Verifiability#Reliable sources, which says "Articles should be based upon reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Reliable sources are needed to substantiate material within articles, and citations directing the reader to those sources are needed to give credit to authors and publishers, in order to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations." To allow unsourced and poorly sourced material to stay on the page is to invite original research, plagiarism, copyvios and inaccuracy. Johnfos (talk) 08:15, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikilawyering at its best. Now reread what I wrote. Why not EDIT the new content? Greglocock (talk) 08:28, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

As I've explained, unsourced and poorly sourced material must go. Johnfos (talk) 19:30, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

No, you stated that. You haven't explained why editing is not a better route. Greglocock (talk) 21:50, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

I can see you're getting pretty worked up about this, shouting and using bold text. Better that I say no more. Johnfos (talk) 21:54, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Well you can jump down off that high horse, actually I bolded the text in order to emphasise the important bits. I really do think that the best way to improve wiki is to add content, and inexperienced editors adding large lumps of relevant text is often the quickest way of doing that, as the text can be subsequently refined. The deletionist tendency is one of the biggest blockers is preventing wiki from improving, in my opinion. Greglocock (talk) 22:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi Johnfos, thanks for your comments. I will work on improving the references and sources when I next have some time. I'll put the new text on my user page first so you and others can comment, if you believe that would work well. I agree with your feedback, but I still think it is worth thinking about improvements to the article, because the current version of it is very messy in its structure and not consistent in its viewpoint (see the comments below, which I posted previously but didn't get any responses yet). It is also partially unsourced, so maybe we should delete the other unsourced sections as well? GNOJED3891 (talk) 22:21, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

No the correct approach is to flag unsourced contentious statements with cn tags, not to delete them wholesale. Your other suggestion is good. Greglocock (talk) 22:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Substantial deletion of existing citations in the Wind power usage section

Earlier today, 2009-10-22T11:46:51, User:Sgitheanach made a good faith major update to the Wind_power#Wind_power_usage section of the article. While updating historical installed capacity data for many of the countries in the list, several existing citations -- which may well have sourced some other assertions in the existing table -- were removed. I have have not yet taken the time to crawl through the substantial deletions and see what might have been lost, I do think that some one (or several) of the editors interested in this article will need to do that. In other words, I have no problem with the sourced and cited changes of numerical data in the table. However, I have considerable reservations about the deletion of the several thousand characters and sources that were, formerly, at the top of the table. What do other editors think? N2e (talk) 15:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC) ok —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.216.236.131 (talk) 16:56, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Questionable relevance of comparision

"However, studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the number that die as a result of other human activities, and especially the environmental impacts of using non-clean power sources"

Indeed, other human activities cost many many times as much bird lives; one just has to think of celebrating Christmas and of egg-farming (where as good as all male new born birds are killed). But is this relevant in this article? As far as a comparision is made to other ways of generating electricity yes, but not in general. So it might be better to change the relative sentence in:

"However, studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the number that die as a result of certain other ways of generating electricity, and especially of the environmental impacts of using non-clean power sources".

"CERTAIN other ways", because for instance generating solar energy seems to cost no bird (or fish) lives at all. --VKing (talk) 23:40, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

By the way, there also seems to be wind energy coming up, of which generation doesn't cost any bird lifes at all: [16].

Not sure whether it's mentioned already in one of the relative articles. --VKing (talk) 02:21, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Economics of wind power - Neutrality issue

A few thoughts:

• The section on economics should start with a general explanation of what drives the cost of wind power and why it is so hard to determine before discussing different views on the economics of wind power (e.g., Helm (2009)). This should help improve the neutrality. I wrote a first draft, please edit and add if this works. There is clearly overlap with other forms of Levelized Cost calculations, and I am hoping to update the article Levelized cost sometime too.
• Some of the topics in the economics section now overlap with the topics mentioned before (capacity factor, indirect cost of back-up and balancing. Also, the chapter on economics is now a weird collection of random topics (e.g., the theoretical potential is currently not written through an economic lens)
• Electrical wind power should be clearly split from other forms, and within electrical wind power, the topics technology, environmental impact, theoretical potential, economic potential (including capacity factor and intermittency / variability should be split more clearly.

Overall: it seems that someone needs to take a fresh look at the overall structure of the article (which i'm happy to do when I have more time). Any suggestions? GNOJED3891 (talk) 22:23, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for making the changes. Enescot (talk) 02:01, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

There's got to be something out there that remarks on the coincidence that the country with the highest wind penetration in the world also has the freakin' highest electricity prices in Europe. Are the wind power builders getting a subsidy on the backs of Danish electricity consumers? And does the Danish experience replicate the job-killing effect noted in the Spanish study just added to the article? (Which I haven't had time to read yet, but which does seem to say every wind megawatt killed 4 Spanish jobs.) The research continues...--Wtshymanski (talk) 14:28, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

The impacts to migration and the ecosystem is missing

The article missed a discussion on migration. Birds will avoid turbines and likely will avoid areas on the far side of turbines. If there is no research, I'd expect that there would be a comment at the least.

With migrating birds avoiding turbine areas, and that hawks and bats will be discouraged to hunt near turbines, the ecosystem will change (e.g., an increase in the mouse population, which causes a decrease in ___ population...). If there is no research, then a comment would be appropriate.

I'm very distant from this subject so I leave it for regular editors to consider how to include the content. M) (talk) 14:33, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

See Environmental effects of wind power. —WWoods (talk) 18:08, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

"If there is no research, then a comment would be appropriate." If there is no RS to back up the claim, then it would be original research to include it. Fell Gleaming^(talk) 14:37, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure it's possible to find a reliable source that says there has been no research, if that is indeed the case. However, I'm pretty sure there's plenty of research on the subject, just a matter of finding it. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 14:48, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

An inconsistency about the production cost?

Hi people. I am not well versed into these matters but is not there some inconsistency between the following two claims from the article about the cost of wind generated electricity, pay attention to the values in the bold font:
"Cost per unit of energy produced was estimated in 2006 to be comparable to the cost of new generating capacity in the US for coal and natural gas: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MW·h, coal at $53.10/MW·h and natural gas at $52.50.[89]"
and
"In 2004, wind energy cost a fifth of what it did in the 1980s, and some expected that downward trend to continue as larger multi-megawatt turbines were mass-produced.[90] However, installed cost averaged €1,300 a kW in 2007,[91] compared to €1,100 a kW in 2005.[92]"
As I understand one kW is a much smaller amount of power than one MW.h, and yet according to these claims it takes much more money to produce one kW than one MW.h (more than 1,100 euros compared to less than 54 $). 1 MW.h = 1000 kW.h, and 1 kW.h amounts to 3600 kW. --Atlaspasifik (talk) 11:10, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

How deep is that swimming pool? Five thousand gallons. Wrong units. Meditate on the difference between energy and power. How far is it to New York? Sixty miles per hour.. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:39, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think Wtshymanshi's response was as helpful as it could be. Atlas, see watt and compare to Kilowatt hour. I'm not super well-versed either, but I think that if a wind turbine produced a kW consistently over the year, it would produce about 24*30*12=8640 kW-hours in a year. That's about 8.64 MW-hours per year. I think the numbers in the article are odd too because, if one kW hour of capacity costs about €1,300 ($1737 at current exchange), then at an unrealistic continuous capacity, it would cost about $1737/8.64 = $201 per MW-hour per year. We would expect wind turbines to not produce power continuously; one empirical estimate says 1.7 GWh/per MW installed capacity (equivalent to 1.7MWh/kW capacity - you divide numerator and denominator by 1000), we would expect the price to be even higher. I looked through sources 91 and 92. In contrast to 89, which is direct, the numbers from 91 and 92 appear to be hand-calculated. Page 7 of ref 92 says "The total value of new generating equipment installed was over 12 billion euro, or 14 billion USD". It appears this was used to calculate the figure. While it does appear to generate a similar number, it also seems like it might be misleading. II | (t - c) 18:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Unlike the 2005 wind report, I'm not able to find the support for "installed cost averaged €1,300 a kW in 2007" at all in the cited source Continuing boom in wind energy – 20 GW of new capacity in 2007; "cost" doesn't appear at all in the source. Will be removing after a few days. II | (t - c) 18:52, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Weasel wording

Paragraphs that present wind as attractive, clean, an abundant without attribution are the very definition of weasel-wording. They also do readers a disservice, as the text fails to speak to the very real problems with using wind power to fill more than a small percentage of overall energy needs. Writing overly optimistic statements without attribution is a violation of WP:NPOV. Fell Gleaming^(talk) 17:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Where does the article say that only wind energy must be used to the exclusion of all other sources of energy? There's *lots* of strings to the bow. We don't generally repeatedly cite things every time they are referred to in an overviewe or introductory part of an article; the rest of the article addresses (or should address), "clean", "abundant", "renewable", etc.; and plugging up the article with excessive tags is just as much an expression of a point of view. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:03, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Let's find some good references anyway. Quite a sceptical one, which the Prof(?) may accept, is "Without Hot Air", an internet book which quantitatively estimates UK renewable energy resources. Stephen B Streater (talk) 18:12, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Environmental effects of wind power: nuclear power is better than wind?

Currently an edit war, or a 'healthy debate' depending on your P.O.V. is underway in the spur article: Environmental effects of wind power. One editor (FellGleaming) has made several repeated changes to the article casting wind power in a more negative light and stated that it uses 'many more times' the 'resources' than power from nuclear power plants. Another editor (myself) has asserted that key changes made to the article's lede were done using a citation and data related to 1990s era wind turbines which were far less efficient than current ones, and has reverted those changes as being unsupported by contemporary data. This evening an individual I believe may be a possible associate of the former again made the same changes to the article to state that wind power uses many more times the resources than nuclear power, and also stated in his/her edit summary: 'tell it like it is'.

Contributors interested in ensuring that the article uses reliable, accurate sources and maintains a N.P.O.V. are invited to view the dialogue here and joint the discussion. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 04:15, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

EDF Energy powered

I made a post about a life-cycle study of a 2 MW turbine that is the most recent that can be found in open literature. No body has said anything about what I wrote even though it basically kills the myth that this is all over 1990 style wind turbines. It's not. The material inputs for wind versus nuclear (per MWh) is maybe a factor of 7 for the 'old' ones referred to but more like 5 for new turbines. But this doesn't even address the main problem that according to the article Environmental effects of wind power the main environmental effect of wind is that it displaces fossil fuels, which is good. This is an insult to anyone who has edited Environmental effects of nuclear power (me) where nothing anywhere close to that can be gotten away with. -Theanphibian ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:53, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Merging Safety section of Environmental Issues into Wind Power

I would agree that the Safety section is out of place in the Environmental Issues article. --71.214.221.153 (talk) 21:14, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Need to Archive the Table

The two tables about the installed capacity and the electricity output are getting too big. I propose to archive the first two years (2005, 2006) and show only 07~ 09. There is already the Installed wind power capacity, if needed, we should make a new article called, list of countries by electricity from wind power.Calvingao (talk) 18:23, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

A tangential suggestion ... whether the table is moved or not, it would be interesting the see the latest year data expressed in terms of installed MW per capita. Some of the countries at the top of the table - eg China - are large in terms of population (and land area). Thus a per capita column would yield very interesting comparisons and would also assist with comparing the average European Union installed power with the individual member countries - ie are some contributing more per capita while others are dragging average down.--Cruickshanks (talk) 05:59, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

They are getting too big. Archiving the earlier years would be in order. An additional suggestion, ... a table with the top 15 or so countries in wind power percentage, just the most recent figures. --Aflafla1 (talk) 00:50, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Wrong unit - Please revise !

I was wondering for a while, but now I am pretty sure that: Quote from Wikipedia "at the end of 2009, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 159.2 gigawatts (GW)" must be replaced by megawatt (MW).

Check http://www.gwec.net/fileadmin/documents/PressReleases/PR_stats_annex_table_2nd_feb_final_final.pdf

Please also check whether units on quote: "Energy production was 340 TWh, which is about 2% of worldwide electricity usage" have to be revised.

Thanks

Lars-Petter —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.177.226.3 (talk) 17:37, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, wrong alert. In germany we do use a comma for the decimal point and vice versa (point for thousands). Thats why I got confused. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.177.224.180 (talk) 17:56, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

citations for Environmental effects section

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Environmental_effects has a couple of [citation needed]s. i can't add any because the article is locked. could someone with an account copy the citation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_wind_power#Carbon_dioxide_emissions_and_pollution . thanks 87.127.117.246 (talk) 18:55, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Avoiding confusing units of measure

The latest edit made today by IP editor 87.112.177.193 was possibly serendipitous, since it also eliminated a common problem for this encyclopedia which is accessed by diverse cultures world-wide: avoiding the use of certain long and short units of measure above 'million', since units such as billion, trillion, etc... have very different meanings in different areas of the world. Thus, one 'million-million watts' is the preferred form of usage, over one 'trillion watts', which has two different, and conflicting definitions.

Wikipedia's Manual of Style on large numbers is actually unhelpful in this instance, since it mandates the usage of Short Scale definitions for large numbers (billion and trillion), which of course doesn't help lay readers world-wide avoid misunderstanding the actual values being described. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 15:04, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

If the style manual says short scale notation should be used then that would seem to mandate the short scale. This is English-speaking Wikipedia so it is not madness to use the short scale since the vast majority of the English speaking world uses the short scale in practice (The USA, New Zealand, Australia, English-speaking Canada, Ireland, the UK (including Wales, since Welsh uses the short scale too), English-speaking Hong Kong and English-speaking Singapore). Nailedtooth (talk) 01:50, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Agreed that the MOS styles take precedence when writing or editing an article ––but the point above being that since English is the most widely used language in the world, many hundreds of millions of users for whom English is a second or third language will be looking at numbers in our articles, such as 'three trillion watts', with many not realizing that the number refers to 3 x 10¹², but instead believing it means the much larger 3 x 10¹⁸ value. However if the number is instead written as 'three million million' (same value as 'three trillion') watts then 100% of the readership will understand the correct value from the getgo. I believe the WP article on long and short scales also makes that suggestion. HarryZilber (talk) 03:23, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

• Couldn't this issue be easily avoided by using the largest appropriate metric prefix? --E8 (talk) 03:37, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Change to section heading

The section title "Intermittency and penetration limits" is obscure and likely baffling to lay readers. I'd recommend an improved, simpler title for that section, such as "Energy storage and supply levelling". Comments? HarryZilber (talk) 15:26, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from 94.66.94.74, 21 November 2010

{{edit semi-protected}}

Wind power, also known as Aeolic (or Eolian or Æolian) energy

94.66.94.74 (talk) 10:20, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Not done: All of the sources I see using that term are doing it because they are referring to companies like Aeolis--that is, it doesn't seem to be a commonly used term. If you can find reliable sources using the term outside of references to these companies, we could reconsider. Qwyrxian (talk) 11:37, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Text for discussion

Wind power is non-dispatchable, meaning that for economic operation, all of the available output must be taken when it is available. Other resources, such as hydropower, and load management techniques must be used to match supply with demand.

I've moved this unsourced text from the lead for discussion. The main problem here is one of overgeneralization, but also the insistent use of two "musts" makes it POV. With reference to the first sentence, who says that for economic operation, all of the available output must be taken when it is available? There are examples of wind farms which are economic even when not all available output is taken. With reference to the second sentence there are several desalination plants supplied by dedicated wind farms not far from here, where matching electricity supply with demand is just not an issue. Johnfos (talk) 00:19, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

The only thing a wind farm has to sell is energy - if you don't sell all the wind energy you make, whenever you happen to make it, you are not giving the investors the best return on their dollar; even the subsidies don't pay anything other than per kwh delivered. It's not point of view, it's economics. Can you find an example of a wind project that was installed on the basis of NOT selling every kwh it could make, whenever it could? --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:28, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

An example is the Peñascal Wind Power Project which shuts down turbines when they are likely to present a danger to migrating birds. As I say, there are clearly large wind power installations that do not conform to the generalizations presented here. And telling readers that this must be done and that must be done is just POV. Johnfos (talk) 21:08, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

China in the lead

China is probably now leading in installed capacity. However, my reference has data originating from two different sources.[17] Are we to wait for a single source before adding to the article or can we run with this? Rmhermen (talk) 19:12, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

constrained off

It is widely discussed by apparent experts, that during high wind conditions, wind output could be contrained off. this means that wind can provide spinning reserve or fast response thus generatring revenue by not generating.Engineman (talk) 20:48, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

That's original,anyway. If it's widely discussed, could you lay your hands on a citation or two that dicusses this idea? Again, just because *I've* never heard of someone building a wind farm to *not* generate electricity doesn't mean it can't happen. If I were a utility I don't think I'd pay very much for "spinning reserve" provided by windmills; what if I need those megawatts on one of those hot still July afternoons? --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:07, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

The spinning reserve and fast response markets are dynamic - so wind turbine wouldn't offer the service in one of your hot still July afternoons - they would be offering it on very windy winters....and could obvious do it at a lower cost than an old coal plant part loaded........Engineman (talk) 20:48, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Why does it need a reference it is patently obvious? but I'll find one.Engineman (talk) 20:48, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Not obvous to me, but then I may well be dumber than the average bear. Do utilities really bid for spinning reserve on an hour-by-hour basis? (My head aches in sympathy.) I would have thought that would be useless from a system planning point of view...you'd want spinning reserve to be a comitted resource, not something that only pops up during favorable weather. Anyway, I'd be really interested in seeing a description of a wind project where an appreciable part of the revenue stream was anticipated to be due to provision of spinning reserve! --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:29, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

This paper implies that curtailement is seen as an optoin for spinning reserve.

" This portfolio would result in 0.02% wind curtailment for reasons other than the provision of spinning reserve." http://www.icrepq.com/icrepq'10/665-Finn.pdf Increased Penetration of Renewable Energy using Demand Side Management:Immersion Heater Analysis .Engineman (talk) 20:48, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

here is a better one: Regulatory Authorities’ Discussion on Policy for Large-Scale, Intermittent Non-Diverse Generation

http://www.allislandproject.org/GetAttachment.aspx?id=3fa7415a-8c43-4205-b304-76fbbeb9492b " · Constraints: The issue of non-firm access notwithstanding, it is the view of EirGrid and SONI that reductions in the output of wind farms because of limitations in the transmission infrastructure (network congestion) and for provision of system services (constraining down for reserve, for example) should be treated no differently to conventional generation, which are subject to the same constraints;" .Engineman (talk) 20:48, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Abstract Electricity markets are currently evolving to accommodate large scale penetration of wind generation. In this research, potential changes to the classification and role of wind generators in the Single Electricity Market (SEM), the market for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, are examined. The effect of wind generators opting to become price-making and the potential for wind generators to provide positive spinning reserve is investigated. By submitting bids for available generation, price-making wind generators can increase their revenues from the market and influence the average electricity price. Results also show reduced emissions and systems costs arise in allowing wind to provide spinning reserve.(talk) 20:48, 18 January 2011 (UTC) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F5577387%2F5588047%2F05590007.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5590007&authDecision=-203 (talk) 20:48, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1583744

...could be..., ...potential..., ...research... to me indicates this is still at the study stage and hasn't (yet) had any influence on the economic case for any given wind power project. Maybe worth mentioning on that basis, but don't lead our readers to think that shareholders are getting dividends for providing, oh, say, frequency control from their wind power investment. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:59, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

wind turbines can control freqency

"Wind turbines emulating inertia and supporting primary" frequency control Abstract

"The increasing penetration of variable-speed wind turbines in the electricity grid will result in a reduction of the number of connected conventional power plants. This will require changes in the way the grid frequency is controlled. In this letter, a method is proposed to let variable-speed wind turbines emulate inertia and support primary frequency control. The required power is obtained from the kinetic energy stored in the rotating mass of the turbine blades".(talk) 20:48, 18 January 2011 (UTC) From: "Enercon Inertial Emulatoin improves frequency stability" Windblatt 03 / 2010 p 9 (talk) 20:48, 18 Enercon are actually offering this as a commercial benefit of their plant.....

Edit request from MaiqueSa, 15 February 2011

{{edit semi-protected}}

The installed wind power for 2010 is wrong as you can see from http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php there is a graphic with the installed capacity in june 2010 and it is completely different than what is shown in the wikipedia page.

World Wind Energy Association is a reputable source. Thank you MaiqueSa (talk) 12:17, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

The short answer is no. The figures are right. You have provided figures for June 2010. The figures shown on the page are for end of 2010. The figures you have provided are out of date. See, for example, the EWEA 2010 report, dated Feb 2011 Ernestfax^Talk 15:37, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Wind turbine spacing?

This story may be worth tracking: "Study yields better turbine spacing for large wind farms" (2011).
This is probably related: "Wind farm wakes" (2010).
—WWoods (talk) 06:29, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Include link to Unconventional wind turbines

Since this topic is locked, could an Editor with authority please provide

the internal link Unconventional wind turbines in this Wind Power's See Also section

CasualVisitor (talk) 19:45, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

It's already linked in the navbox. One might argue that unconventional turbines don't make any power anyway, and so are irrelevant to this article. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:03, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Three Blade Design

Why is a three blade design preferable? Why not two? Or many like the old farm windmills? What is the underlying theory? Is it material savings or better efficiency? Is it a tradeoff? 12.25.75.72 (talk) 20:27, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

• Hendrik Stiesdal, Chief Technology Officer for Siemens Wind Power, answers this well in this video.--E8 (talk) 20:39, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

There ought to be a link to Wind turbine design which has a whole section on blade count. --Wtshymanski (talk) 22:22, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

There it is - deep inside the navbox you'll find a link to Wind turbine design. --Wtshymanski (talk) 22:24, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

"the environmental effects of wind power are relatively minor."

How can you possibly say that.Some of the most beautifull countryside has been destroyed by these monsters. I found the whole piece in favour of wind turbines with very little balance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnrhowson (talk • contribs) 07:37, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

The article points out that, aesthetics aside, the physical effects of wind turbines are relatively minor. Remember also that while you may not appreciate their appearance, others do, similar to the fact that while some people don't like cities, others definitely do.

Many people likely consider wind turbines to be less obtrusive than open pit coal mines, nuclear powerplants, and even natural gas fired powerplants. As measured by physical pollutants, wind turbines, solar, geothermal and hydro powerplants are the cleanest energy sources in the world. HarryZilber (talk) 03:26, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Hi Johnrhowson, sorry you feel that the article is incomplete. If you can find some reliable sources to add in to it, then please do add them, or mention them here. For the impact on your own countryside, could you provide some info with references - for example, when did windmills first appear in your part of the world? Aesthetics are trickily subjective, but if there has been specific environmental destruction (i.e. not changed views, but destroyed ecologies), then please do provide a reliable source that identifies them Ernestfax^Talk 08:54, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

The sentence "According to a town councillor in Ardrossan, Scotland, the overwhelming majority of locals believe that the Ardrossan Wind Farm has enhanced the area, saying that the turbines are impressive looking and bring a calming effect to the town." should be removed because it is only a personal opinion of a "town coucillor" and not a fact. Otherwise you have to look for an opposite opinion about wind farms, a negative opinion about the visual impact of wind turbines I mean, and put it in this article. 84.151.189.230 (talk) 21:45, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Economics of wind power claim: 1300 euro / kW, 1100 euro / kW

The "Cost trends" heading of the "Economics of Wind Power" section contains the following claim:

The marginal cost of wind energy once a plant is constructed is usually less than 1 cent per kW·h.[69] In 2004, wind energy cost a fifth of what it did in the 1980s, and some expected that downward trend to continue as larger multi-megawatt turbines were mass-produced.[70] However, installed cost averaged €1,300 a kW in 2007,[53][not in citation given] compared to €1,100 a kW in 2005.[71][clarification needed] Not as many facilities can produce large modern turbines and their towers and foundations, so constraints develop in the supply of turbines resulting in higher costs.[72]

This claim is totally unsupported by the citations given. Furthermore, it is at odds with reality and demonstrably false. Coal costs around $2/W (or $2000/kW, don't mean for this to be precise but a ballpark figure). At $1.1 euro / W, wind power would be way cheaper than coal and there would be no economic reason to keep using fossil fuels. Intuitively, we know that wind power is way more expensive than fossil fuels (otherwise we would not use fossil fuel in the first place), so it is obvious that these figures must be wrong.

In reality, wind costs are closer to $7/W.

Since I don't have an account I can't fix this myself. Someone please do so for me.

128.135.100.102 (talk) 22:50, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Who's spending $7000 a kw on wind plants? That wouldn't fly even with a healthy FIT. The US DOE says here [18] that the 2009 capital cost of wind plants was around US $2120 per kilowatt, up from US $1950 for projects in 2008. --Wtshymanski (talk) 23:36, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, when someone reports, for example, that a 10-kW plant is being built that does not mean that the plant will generate 10-kw 24 hours a day. That number refers to the peak capacity which is rarely attained by wind power plants. If the average output is half that then the cost per kW is double the stated amount.   Will Beback  talk  01:06, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Note that discussion of capital cost per kW is highly misleading. While wind turbines have very high capital and installation costs, their operating costs are extremely low since there are no fuels to be purchased during daily operations, which is basically the opposite of all carbon and nuclear powerplants, many of which carry hidden costs as well, and remember that with peak oil and peak coal, etc..., fuel costs will only keep rising.

I would suggest revising the section on economics to include life cycle costs, i.e. the cost per kWh amortized over the project's life, when it is either decommissioned and scrapped or replaced with a new similar unit. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 02:27, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, yes, but that's not what it says. It says cost per kw, not cost per kwh. If you buy a gas turbine that only runs 100 hours a year, it still costs mumblety-thousand dollars per kilowatt no matter how many hours it runs per year. Shoreham cost over $7000 a kilowatt and never delivered power to the grid. Capital cost per kilowatt is only one factor in Electricity pricing ( an article which also needs work). --Wtshymanski (talk) 03:25, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from Niklas Caspers (talk) 14:12, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Under Economics -> Cost Trends the following sentence is inprecise and not supported by citations, I request it be deleted: "Other sources in various studies have estimated wind to be more expensive than other sources." Also a sentence might be added: "The DOE aggreed in 2010 that the price MW·h for Wind power is comparable to Coal and other fosil fuels." The report can be found here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html It also already cited in this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Governments across the world subsidise wind power and so the argument proposed here is extraordinary. I have checked the eia reference given here and can not find the quoted words given "the DOE agreed.....". Indeed, inspection of the cost table on this reference indicates the cost of wind generated electricity is approx 50 percent higher than CCGT so I can not see how Niklas Caspers request can be supported. Spiralwind (talk) 21:40, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Capacity factor

Yes, in a physics lecture hall, if the lecturer snaps on a nameplate on the generator which rates it at twice the power, suddenly the capacity factor has dropped in half. But people who actually build wind power plants rate the generators at the peak power that can be obtained at the site (or a little less), and can't afford to buy double-size generators just to make the capacity factor look smaller. For a given site, the height of the tower matters a lot more than if you've installed a 250 kW turbine and generator or a 300 kW turbine and generator(with proportionately larger blades). --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:26, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Or a little less? How much less? No, it's not simply a question of optimising for peak power, and in any case you wouldn't want to optimise for lower load factor. The point is that the engineers try to optimize the generator size to the site conditions to generate maximum average money/power, and it essentially just happens due to the shape of the typical windspeed distributions curve that that nearly always works out at about 30+-5%. But critics frequently quote this as an inherent (in)efficiency of wind power, whereas it's just how engineers optimise given the usual site windspeed distribution and the power you can generate from it. -Rememberway (talk) 16:05, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

But the capacity factor is not proportional to the size of the machine! If the wind only blows on Monday and Tuesday and is still the rest of the week, you cannot get a capcity factor beigger than 28% no matter what size generator you install. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:43, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

probability of no wind is zero)

That's an entirely fictitious example. The wind essentially never drops, in reality it's almost always blowing a bit, just not generating huge power. But if you fit a tiny generator you would get 80-90% capacity factor because you would max out the generator you did fit. They just don't do that, because you get less power. They almost always try to optimise for maximum profit. I mean check out the graph for example, there's no chance of zero windspeed:

-Rememberway (talk) 17:38, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Life-cycle of wind turbine

Are there any studies of the maintanance requirements of wind turbines? How does it compare in man hours with conventional power plants including mining and transportation etc.? 12.25.75.72 (talk) 20:27, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

From sources I've read, wind turbines are more reliable than plants using steam turbines. O&M costs for wind power includes the lease payments to landowners, and thus sources will have O&M costs for wind power higher than coal or other. But less the lease payments, the actual operating and maintenance costs are less. --71.214.212.206 (talk) 21:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I changed the title of this topic from "maintenance" to life cycle. The purpose is - all systems have a life-cycle cost. Research (concept), design and development, production, sustaining (maintenance) and finally disposal or end-of-life. Each phase isn't free. This has to be part of the article, or else it's just selling "free energy" without the fine print.--74.107.74.39 (talk) 00:36, 6 April 2011 (UTC) Italic text

Gas turbines run as peakers

The statement about gas turbine plants running primarily as peakers appears to be dated. Relatively recent (2009) reductions in price of natural gas and the fact that gas turbines provide 20% of U.S. electricity indicate that plants are often run as load followers. --Aflafla1 (talk) 21:56, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

New Limitations section is problematic

I refer to this edit [19], which I have reverted. Much of this additional material is poorly sourced, and contrary to what has been said, the U.S. Department of Energy’s report 20% Wind Energy by 2030 envisioned that wind power could supply 20% of all U.S. electricity, which included a contribution of 4% from offshore wind power.

It seems that as time goes on integrating wind power is becoming less of a problem, and there are now many ways to address the challenges of intermittency. Mark A. Delucchi and Mark Z. Jacobson report that there are at least seven ways to design and operate variable renewable energy systems so that they will reliably satisfy electricity demand:

• (A) interconnect geographically-dispersed naturally-variable energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, wave, tidal), which smoothes out electricity supply (and demand) significantly.
• (B) use complementary and non-variable energy sources (such as hydroelectric power) to fill temporary gaps between demand and wind or solar generation.
• (C) use “smart” demand-response management to shift flexible loads to a time when more renewable energy is available.
• (D) store electric power, at the site of generation, (in batteries, hydrogen gas, compressed air, pumped hydroelectirc power, and flywheels), for later use.
• (E) over-size renewable peak generation capacity to minimize the times when available renewable power is less than demand and to provide spare power to produce hydrogen for flexible transportation and heat uses.
• (F) store electric power in electric-vehicle batteries, known as "vehicle to grid" or V2G.
• (G) forecast the weather (winds, sunlight, waves, tides and precipitation) to better plan for energy supply needs.

These are discussed in the Intermittency article. Johnfos (talk) 01:22, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, technically, it is well-documented in reliable sources that intermittency is a solved problem - Gregor Czisch demonstrated this in his doctoral thesis back in 2005, now | translated into English in 2011. To add to the Delucchi & Jacobson list of 7 solutions, there is also the use of synthesised CH4 for storage, via | methanation of CO2, within a process called CCR - carbon capture and recycling Ernestfax^Talk 16:44, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

POV?

For lobbying the article shows wind lobbying to be 5 million $ and nuclear to be 650 million. Some problems after investigating the source 79 and 80 (well the source of their sources)

1) it compares 10 years to 1 for nuclear it was 84 million $ that year

2) it only compares one lobbying group (though there are more) to the spending power of 20 (found so far). If an equivalent group is used (biggest lobby group vs biggest lobby group) the result is 4.5 million $ vs 13.45 million $

I sure this was not deliberate as the sources don't mention these numbers though their sources do. Any comments? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.151.167.42 (talk) 19:12, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 71.235.237.14, 22 August 2011

The table entitled "Top 10 wind power countries (February 2011)" reports data from 2010, but from a document published in 2011. I think the date is misleading and should be changed to 2010.

The table entitled "Top 10 electricity generation EU countries (March 2011)" reports data from 2010, but from a document published in 2011. I think the date is misleading and should be changed to 2010

71.235.237.14 (talk) 14:14, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks! Samwb123^T-C-E 18:12, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Edir requests from EdH Ire (talk) 20:03, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

In the paragraph Penetration:

-First line: 'total available generation capacity' would include reserved capacity. Would it not be better to use 'System demand' here?

-The use of 'At present' is confusing. It is when the writer wrote it but the reader reads it as 'NOW'. Better would be 'As off 2005' or '2006'

-The value for the Irish annual wind-penetration is quite old. Mentioned is 'over 6%' while the value expected for 2011 is 14%. (mentioned already two times in this article)

-The value for the Spanish Peak-penetration is half demand, but should be 53%

-A clear distinction has to be made between the first and the last values in the paragraph. The first values are annual values, while the last one is an instant Peak value. (If values are mingled, the result is a apple with pear comparison)

-I suggest to break the paragraph in two. deal with the annual values in the first and with the Peak-values in the second part. Comparison of the Spanish peak value can be done with the Irish peak-value of 54.19% which was reached 0:30 hour at 6 September 2011 (Source: My own results from Eirgrid data (wind-gen./system demand). See also: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=1973372250425

For now I don't have edit rights. So I hope someone who has will do the editing.

Thanks in advance

EdH Ire (talk) 20:03, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I agree the 'penetration' section needs work and has gotten somewhat out of date. (Locking is a necessary evil on this article, as it's vandalized pretty much daily when the lock is taken off.) So what would people say about a rev like as follows:

Wind energy "penetration" may refer to several different things:

--The percentage of wind power generation capacity compared with total available generation capacity

--The amount of energy generated by wind power as a percentage of total energy generated (or consumed) over a year (or other period of time)

--The instantaneous amount of power generated by wind compared to the total power on the grid.

With the second definition, some countries have achieved penetrations in excess of 10%. Denmark produces over 20% of its electricity from wind power. Spain and Portugal have about 15% penetration, while Ireland has about 14% penetration. The current level for the U.S. is about 3%.

In this meaning, the level of penetration that may economically achieved is dependent on factors such as the availability of other generating facilities to compensate for wind power's variability, the geographic distribution of the wind farms, and the acceptable quality levels of grid power. Studies indicate a large grid with widely dispersed wind farms should be able to accommodate 20% wind penetration economically. In order to compensate for higher levels of variability, the amount of reserve generating capacity needs to be increased, which increases costs. (aside: estimates have %20 wind power in U.S. requiring at most a 20% increase in spinning reserve.)

Considering penetration as peak instantaneous electrical power, Spain has had on at least one occurrence over 50% of its power come from wind. Peak penetration in Ireland was nearly 55% on 6 September 2011. While in the U.S. MISO has reported that at times 25% of the power on it's part of the grid has come from wind power. Q:Has Denmark or another country had 100% penetration at any time?

-------------

I'm reasonably sure I have references for what's in the above. Feel free to comment.

btw, 'At present' pretty much means what it says, the time the reader is reading the article. Not likely that the number of countries which generate over 5% of their electricity is going to change from a handful to 30 or 40 in the time between when the statement was written and when one reads it, considering how often the article changes. Still, I understand your point -it can confuse the reader. --Aflafla1 (talk) 06:37, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

"Q:Has Denmark or another country had 100% penetration at any time?" - yes, I'm pretty sure it has. I've seen a report somewhere that mentions this, for Denmark. When I find the reference, I'll post it here. Ernestfax^Talk 08:10, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

EdH Ire (talk) 22:13, 26 September 2011 (UTC) Thank you Aflafla1 for your willingness and time.

I have some points to talk about, but an Eirgrid Sustainability Manager has expressed he wanted to talk to me in relation to 6 Sept value. As his input might influence my response, I prefer to wait for his call or contact him. That talk was quite informative. Instantaneous Penetration (IP) values I calculate from .csv Data from Eirgrids web. The 15 min. data values are integrations over that time. In general 'system demand' values are a bit lower than actual, but so are 'wind generation' values, because all TS is counted and most of DS, but not all, all the time. Overall there is a good match between web data and TSO's internal IP data. For the data I provide I would add '(+/-2%)' after the IP value.

On your Q about 100% IP he told me that he recons that the tech. max. would be 75% in the 'All Ireland' Context (but he included future wave power into that figure. and for wind the 'Buzz word' was 'Frequency control') That value is pretty high, but it is the use of the right technology that enables that.

In Europe (Spain, Portugal and Denmark) that value could be higher, because they have better grid stability by being connected to a continental grid. Ireland only has DC-interconnector(s) with the UK and is therefore a small frequency island. Advantage: no freq. propagation to far. Disadvantage, no freq. stabilization from far, so our generators have keep the generation/demand balance @1, if not the frequency runs away and trips are activated.(maybe to simple)

For the US values you mentioned, I consider that max. 20% quite low. I have sensed that the US energy industry 'drives a car while pressing the brakes', while it should invest in a stronger grid with RE and energy storage capabilities. Texas blames wind as the cause for their black out, but the resent blackout in Arizona etc. was caused by switch-gear and freq. propagation. Not wind neither Nuclear although the last was involved and extended the blackout.

Spinning reserve: If a NG is designed to run most efficient at 80% cap. than it has a margin of 20+% for higher output and even more for lower outputs. Pumped storage Hydro has an almost instant capability to cope with excess demand or cover for time-lag of starting-up standby power. Coal is less flexible than NG-turbines and Nuclear is a beast in this respect, because of its Xeon poisoning properties in the power reducing trajectory. (please feel free to verify this. As I will not hide that I am a No Nuke man, even in Energy) The MOX fuel variant I believe takes quite some time to get going. than you just let it go for a year till its 100 tons of fuel degrades or other problem occurs. let the radiation reduce for weeks or months and open it to change fuel and do maintenance. So in fact base-load machines with long intermittency times, and also needs other generation sources to cover daily demand variations in the grid, alike RE.

Difference is that the grid is historically built around the properties of Nuclear and not around those of RE.

Once again Nuclear has proven to be potentially dangerous and if I imagine an EPR in the same multi-disaster situation, than I'm afraid it would not have made much difference for the environment.

As for my Nuke rant, take what you like from it But I understand and respect that the article has to maintain its objectivity.

Small things on your otherwise well formulated text:

-:Wind energy "penetration" may refer to several different things: would leave the word energy out because you later split and take power and energy separate. -I have used the word 'Peak' but the use of max. or IP in this context might be preferred. The first separation is the place to explain IP to the reader. -'total available generation capacity' as I said before includes 'spinning reserve' Maybe acceptable from the US perspective, but not from the European perspective. From Spanish data I conclude that P = 100 * sum( Wind gen. + Negative Hydro + Export)/ Generation mix, with the last as total of all the producing sources. Non producing sources are not included. Should they be or should the US work to get their innovation act together ? (Taking into account that world leaders have said they take 'climate change' seriously, I'm inclined to say 'US' don't drag but start moving to achieve that goal. and 'Yes' Infrastructural changes cost money and time, but pay of in the end. Feed-in-tariff is needed to initiate and accelerate change, but can be reduced when that change has been accomplished)

-For separation 2, I also make the distinction between eg 'calender-day' P and 'Rolling 24h P' Eirgrid even does not use that. On one side its makes sense, while on the other it makes it confusing for the reader, because the values don't differ that much and are equal at the time switch. (here at 24:00)

- 14% has been mentioned several times. Maybe mention that Ireland's goal is 37% by 2020.

Enough for today, take what you like EdH_Eire 02:00, 1 October 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by EdH Ire (talk • contribs)

potential resource

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/solar-wind/4324331?click=pop_more 10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design], excerpt ...

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released their 20% Wind Report Card on July 8, following up on a study in which the Department of Energy proposed a goal where 20 percent of U.S. electricity comes from wind energy by 2030. The AWEA gave the overall U.S. push for wind power a “solid B”—high marks from an advocacy group that grades U.S. infrastructure. The highest letter in the report was an A- awarded for “Technology Development.” This is no big surprise—for years now, the government, alternative-energy researchers and entrepreneurs have been putting time and money into making better tech for cleaner, more efficient energy production. Here are 10 wind turbine designs that push the limits of the current design and may help the U.S. get back to being an A student by 2030.

by Lisa Merolla Popular Mechanics December 18, 2009 3:28 AM

97.87.29.188 (talk) 23:14, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Edit request on 21 January 2012

Between the sections "Small-scale Wind Power" and "See Also" instead of there being no section please change it so that there is the following:

==Research==
Recent research into technologies to improve power output from wind turbines include those such as the wind lens or leading edge tubercle's on the blade.

A Wind lens is a modification made to a wind turbine to more efficiently capture wind energy. The modification is a ring structure called a shroud or wind lens which surrounds the blades, diverting air away from the exhaust outflow behind the blades. The effect created as a result of the new configuration creates a low pressure zone behind the turbine, causing greater wind to pass through the turbine, and this, in turn, increases blade rotation and energy output. Wind lenses are being researched in Japan where it is claimed that a wind lens may increase wind power output between 2-4 times depending on the turbine scale and shroud design. Additionally, the shroud acts to dampen noise created at the blade tips.

The blade itself can be designed to locally utilise the same concept in fluid dynamics as the wind lens. Blade designs modelled from the humpback whale flippers to include leading edge tubercle's has been shown to yield an additional 20% power output. This result was determined from field trial and detailed in an independent report </ref> http://www.whalepower.com/drupal/files/PDFs/Dr_Lauren_Howles_Analysis_of_WEICan_Report.pdf. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)</ref>

These two technologies could theoretically be combined to give a synergistically enhanced power output. Assuming an estimated average Energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of 20:1 for current wind power, this number could potentially be increased to over 80:1 for small scale wind power. Wind power at 80:1 EROEI would be more economical and cost competitive than any current fossil fuel or nuclear technology.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Dartangelo (talk • contribs) 00:09, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

86.21.120.152 (talk) 21:57, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

 Not done, This template is for requesting specific changes to the article--Jac16888 ^Talk 22:00, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Closed again. Please read the template: "Please change X" is not acceptable and will be rejected; the request must be of the form "please change X to Y"."--Jac16888 ^Talk 00:12, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Partly done: The text may get removed as original research since the sources are primary sources instead of the secondary sources which are preferred. I left out the last paragraph since the source does not present the conclusion which is made in that paragraph. I think the conclusion steps well into original research. Celestra (talk) 06:22, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

I have removed advertisement for the Wind lens, which already has its own page; consider adding a paragraph to the Wind turbine article if you wish. Johnfos (talk) 09:44, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Updating the statistics

The new report has been published and the new statistics is available. Can someone update the country data? One interesting point is Portugal taking over the 10th place from Denmark.Windstats (talk) 03:04, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

 Done Except the article you cited was only up to June 2011. The GWEC had information on installed capacity through December.--Aflafla1 (talk) 03:46, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Undue weight to promoting wind power.

The article appears to be very biased towards promoting wind power. I can only assume the fact the page is semi-protected means that there have been several disagreements over this is the past. But to me at least, the article seems very one-sided. Here in the UK, generating power by wind is very expensive, which has to be subsidised by the govenment, which is ultimately from the population as a whole.

I could find numerous references to an opposing view. For example, a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph from one of its editors states "Scarcely a week goes by when I am not asked by a local campaign group to publicise their fight against some scheme to build one of those increasingly hated wind farms."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/9120756/How-much-profit-will-a-turbine-turn.html

I don't wish to get into an editing war, which I know can happen with pages like this, but I think the balance needs adressing. Drkirkby (talk) 11:16, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Well... but that's an opinion piece, rather than a scholarly work. It's been through no real peer-review. And Christopher Booker is not what you would describe as a well-respected journalist. Among other weird things he thinks that asbestos and passive smoking are essentially harmless.Teapeat (talk) 14:25, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Support for wind power seems to vary depending on region. I too think that the telegraph article is an opinion piece and should not be used as a citation for the wind power article. --Aflafla1 (talk) 02:31, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

One of numerous dubious statements

The Wikipedia article currently says "The total amount of economically extractable power available from the wind is considerably more than present human power use from all sources." and gives a web reference to this link.

http://www.claverton-energy.com/where-does-the-wind-come-from-and-how-much-is-there.html

writen by Brian Hurley. Nowhere on that page is the word "economically" used. If we read the web page written by Brian Hurley, we see a "See also" section, which provides a link to another topic written by the same author.

http://www.claverton-energy.com/how-much-wind-energy-is-there-brian-hurley-wind-site-evaluation-ltd.html

We see that this author has connections with "Wind Site Evaluation Ltd". He is hardly a neutral source. So there are at least two issues with this reference in the article. Firstly the link does not state what is claimed in the Wikipeda article, and secondly the source is not credable. Apart from those two things, the link is fine!!! I'm no expert on this topic, and it's not high on my lists of interests, but just looking at the whole article, it seems very biased.

BTW, there a chemist who lives where I do, who used to question whether extracting energy from the wind has any effect on the planet. At first I used to think he was mad, but when I thought about it more, perhaps he does have a point. We can't extract oil, gas or coal without having an effect on the planet. Why should be believe that extracting large amounts of wind energy has no effect? Does it for example change the weather? Drkirkby (talk) 11:55, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Drkirkby: related to your last question, there have been several general articles printed that basically say that, yes, wind turbines can have a really, really small and mostly unmeasurable effect on the weather, (which may or may not be akin to the Butterfly Effect). However, the same effect is created many orders of magnitude greater by large, and even medium-sized cities (I don't have a cite for that, but it stands to reason). A similar, observable effect was the upraising of the Himalayan Plain and mountain chain, via Plate techtonics, which led to a change in weather patterns which brought about the end of one of the Ice Ages (as discussed on a Nova episode). I would doubt that erecting ten thousand times more wind turbines on the planet would have a climate-changing impact even close to that, but I'll leave it to the expert climatologists to dwell on. Nevertheless the potential for climate change, or rather the non-potential, would likely make a worthwhile addition to the article.

I would dispute the generalization of bias in the article, b.t.w. Wind power derived energy is a component of green energy, which is the cleanest, least disruptive source of power on the planet, bar none. Yes, every form of energy generation has its own vices, but green energy and wind energy are by far the least evil. Nuclear power, you say? Aside from the catastrophic failures which no engineers can ever prevent (despite all their hocus pocus spin), nuclear energy is not green. Mining, refining, transporting, processing and upgrading nuclear ores into the usable fuels has, besides the pollution involved, a large on-going carbon footprint, which the nuclear cheerleaders conveniently fail to mention when they talk about the virtues of its energy. Slightly off-topic anyways for this page. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 17:07, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

We grow wind turbines from seeds now? Only doing nothing is carbon-neutral. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:23, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to repeat an important earlier statement (follow the bouncing ball):

"Yes, ev•er•y form of en•er•gy gen•er•a•tion has its own vic•es, but green en•er•gy and wind en•er•gy are by far the least e•vil".

That of course is a generalized statement. Nothing was said about green energy being carbon free to create or not having other issues. Cases can also be made that various solar, geothermal, hydro, tidal or biomass power projects can be more benign than some wind power projects, depending of many diverse factors. A good portfolio of different green energy sources will likely be the best of choices. To me it appears unlikely that any form of carbon sequestrated energy will become more benign to the environment than existing green energy, i.m.h.o., but that's a bit of speculation. Irregardless of sequestration, every form of hydrocarbon, and nuclear energy, mined from the ground is a finite resource, with ever dwindling supplies and ever rising prices. People filling their pickups and looking at $300 per tank bills are inevitable. HarryZilber (talk) 02:52, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

A good secondary peer reviewed source for that is http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106 70.58.13.84 (talk) 03:57, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Community debate possibly one-sided

I was a little surprised that my recent addition on the National Trust's opposition to a wind farm near a heritage site was moved to a new section on Community debate which seems to put forward a series of convincing arguments in favour of wind power which are not fully reflected elsewhere. While I myself am a strong proponent of new energy sources, including wind power, I think we should keep the article balanced by presenting arguments against as well as those in favour. This latest addition seems only to distort the picture even further. Would it not perhaps be useful to have a section specifically devoted to arguments against the advantages of wind power, some of which appear fully justified? - Ipigott (talk) 21:56, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I frankly have difficulty understanding how a local debate rises to the level of having merit in an article about wind power in general, isn't there a more specific article where this is more appropriate? --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 23:21, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I think local debate about individual wind farms should not be in this overview article. To date, most of the specific debate material has ended up at Renewable energy debate#Community debate about wind farms. Johnfos (talk) 00:25, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

It should go in both places.Teapeat (talk) 01:49, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually the place it really needs to go is in the individual wind farm article. Johnfos (talk) 02:02, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Ipigott, I think you've been taken in by sensationalist and one-sided media coverage. I read something recently which said: "There is much stronger public support for wind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest, because a vocal minority who oppose wind farms secure the majority of media and political attention". [20] And I agree with that.

As our article says:

Over the past five years (2010 data) the average annual growth in new installations has been 27.6 percent. Wind power market penetration is expected to reach 3.35 percent by 2013 and 8 percent by 2018. Several countries have already achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration, such as 21% of stationary electricity production in Denmark, 18% in Portugal, 16% in Spain, 14% in Ireland and 9% in Germany in 2010. As of 2011, 83 countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis.

Most of those figures are taken from the "World Wind Energy Association (WWEA)", which is not an unbiased organisation. One only has to look at WWEA's Mission Statemement at http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=29 where it says "WWEA works for the promotion and worldwide deployment of wind energy technology." So given they admit they are promoting the technology, of course they are going to give favourable statistics. They have a book section, but note they don't list any books like "The Wind Farm Scam" by Dr. John Etherington. Drkirkby (talk)

How are these usage levels, and steady and sustained growth possible, if there are major disadvantages and significant public opposition to wind power? Johnfos (talk) 00:35, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

As I say, the data is taken from a very pro-wind group, so they can't be trusted for neutrality Drkirkby (talk) 09:45, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

If you wish to read about significant public opposition to an energy technology, see anti-nuclear movement. Johnfos (talk) 00:55, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

No, that would make this article unbalanced. The Wikipedia's way is to be brutally honest about everything.Teapeat (talk) 01:51, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry I don't understand your comment -- that's a bit too cryptic for me. Please expand. Johnfos (talk) 02:02, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Balance in wikipedia articles is based upon WP:WEIGHT, not on presenting each "side" equally, or in different/simplified words: How much literature is there on a given issue within a topic area, compared to the total literature about the topic area. Now i will ask again: How does a local debate rise to the level of having merit in an article about wind power in general? --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 02:10, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

As a strong proponent of new energy sources, I think the wind power article would be better if it presented more clearly some of the arguments which are critical of its advantages in certain environments. It seems to me rather simplistic to pretend these should be relegated to ancillary articles. After all, those wanting to obtain an overview will normally start at the main article. In most cases, wind power has strong advantages over traditional sources of energy. In some cases, though, its detrimental environmental effects (noise, unsightliness of the turbines, comparative advantages of, for example, solar or other developing sources) are important enough to be taken into account. In particular, the appropriate siting of wind farms is a key criterion. The need for far better storage systems is also a factor to be taken more seriously into account. I included the case of the National Trust dispute to indicate that not only local opposition but opposition from the head of a key heritage organization serves to document one of the environmental disadvantages which has been largely overlooked in the article. I still think it would be a good idea to have a section on factors which discourage the adoption of wind power under certain circumstances and not just the emotional ones covered by the media. If presented properly, these are more likely to give credence to its overall advantages than if they are swept under the carpet. - Ipigott (talk) 08:15, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

It is certainly correct that such a section has merit, but it has to consist of literature that describes the general issues, and be balanced according to the weight given to such issues in the literature or be a summary of subarticles. Individual cases are anecdotal, and without a general guidence they are WP:UNDUE (ie. we have to let the general literature define the merit of the issues, not "invent" them ourselves). --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 09:23, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

No, if there's a lot of literature on local debates, it's hard to do, but then Wikipedia should summarise that too.Teapeat (talk) 15:47, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

But realistically, a lot of wind power is being installed, worldwide, and in spite of people that will claim that it's all just subsidies, governments aren't that dumb, in some cases, yes, but not globally. So you would expect the article to be largely positive, but not purely positive.Teapeat (talk) 15:47, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Neither World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) or Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) can be considered a relieable neutral sources

I do not believe either the World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) http://www.wwindea.org/ or the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) http://www.gwec.net/ can be considered reliable neutral sources.

• According to the Mission Statement http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=29 of the WWEA, the "WWEA works for the promotion and worldwide deployment of wind energy technology." That's not neutral. They are clearly promoting wind technology.
• On the page of the GWEC web site to join the organization, we read "GWEC is a trade association working to create a better political environment for wind energy. We work on legislative, regulatory affairs, financial systems and public relations in more than 40 countires." Clearly a body which is working to make a better political climate for wind energy can not be considered neutral.

The Claverton Energy Research Group makes no claims to be pro or against wind, in fact, they state the opposite: "The Claverton Group is neither pro or anti any particular technology or policy – however from time to time, self forming informal sub groups do all agree on a particular issue (whilst other members may still disagree)." Personally, I feel from looking at the Claverton Energy Research Group's web site, they are very pro "alternative" energy sources, but they are certainly not blatantly claiming to be pro-wind like both the WWEA and GWEC do.

I've put the POV tag back, and this is my justification for doing so.

• Many of the sources are not neutral. The lead section is made up extensively of references from WWEA and GWEC, who both openly admit to promoting wind energy.
• It was not me that put the tag there this time (it was Greglocock (talk) ). The neutrality of the article is still being discussed, but user Teapeat (talk) decided to remove the tag, despite the fact the tag says "Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved." Clearly the dispute has not been resolved, so I feel justified in putting the tag back. Drkirkby (talk) 22:02, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Have made some references to GWEC and WWEA explicit, and added an inline "dubious" tag to one statement, but the need for a POV banner on the whole article has not been established. Johnfos (talk) 05:18, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

You have now made well down the page a single "dubious" tag, whilst endless references are made prior to this by two bodies (GWEC and WWEA) are pro-wind. 213.78.42.15 (talk) 06:23, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest that you find some better (more neutral), or alternate, sources rather than inserting your own POV into the article. The reader does not need to be continually told that certain sources are "pro wind" or "promote wind energy." That is apparent from the initial description and the link. If you take issue with a source, find another. Sunray (talk) 23:22, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

I provided a couple of references a week or so ago to the Daily Telegraph. Those were not considered peer reviewed or neutral, so were removed. I'm not going to argue that the Telegraph is the last word on Wind power. I suspect it is hard to get verifiable information on much of what is claimed in this article. At least part of that is due to the fact wind power is so controversial, with numerous groups having their own reasons to give figures that suite them. Whilst there is the odd reference to IEEE journals, most references are to web sites which have a vested interest in promoting their cause. The onus must be on the person that writes something to provide verifiable evidence It it can't be verified, it should not be in Wikipedia. Drkirkby (talk) 00:18, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

You are right, sources are crucial. That doesn't mean we cannot write anything without sources--Wikipedia would not have progressed far if that were the case. But if editors see questionable unsourced material, they should find appropriate sources, or tag it. Sunray (talk) 20:01, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Poor quality of references.

If I'd be dumb enough to write my Ph.D. dissertation like this article is written, I doubt I would have ever got one. The vast majority of the references are to sources which are at best questionable, and in many cases to sources which openly state they promote the technology.

Here are the first 10. are:

1. Global Wind Energy Council GWEC) - a body which states on their own web page "GWEC is a trade association working to create a better political environment for wind energy." http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=60 How on earth can a body by which their own admission works to create a better political climate for wind energy, be considered neutral?
2. Global Wind Energy Council GWEC) - Same comment as above.
3. Claverton Energy Group - claims to be neutral. There are however far more credible energy groups, like the IEEE Power & Energy Society.
4. Global Wind Energy Council GWEC) - Same comment as above.
5. World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) - According to their web site http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=29 "WWEA works for the promotion and worldwide deployment of wind energy technology."
6. Renewable Energy World - No claims of being pro-wind like the GQEC and WWEA do, although there's nothing on the site to give it sufficient credibility to be a neutral or credible source.
7. BTM Consult - a commercial company offering consultancy services on wind. The Wikipedia article mentions them for the growth of 27% per year. But a look at their web page stating this has nothing to back this up http://www.btm.dk/special+issues/others+issues/the+wind+power+sector/?s=42
8. BTM Consult - same comment.
9. Eirgrid - A commercial company, not a scholarly source like the Royal Society, IEEE or similar, but seems reasonably well balanced.
10. Renewable Energy for Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21)

Down at number 17 we have Encyclopaedia Britannica, at 30, we have a reference to a peer reviewed journal, and there are a few more scattered in the over 100 references.

How this article ever got a B-class I will never know. The bias, which is apparent to many, and the poor quality of the references leaves a lot to be desired. Drkirkby (talk) 02:48, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

When you say "bias", I assume you mean that the article does not conform to your point of view. I'm not sure what we can do about that. With respect to the quality of sources and class of the article, I have commented below in the RfC section. Sunray (talk) 20:06, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

POV tag put back

I've stuck the POV tag on the page again. I put it a few days ago, and someone said I was the only one to feel it, so it was removed. But on the ToDo list above we have:

"Per Wikipedia guidelines, this entire Wind Power writeup should be edited to be from a Neutral perspective, rather than its present promotional status."

So I'm not the only one thinking this article is unbalanced. Drkirkby (talk) 00:29, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

There's always going to be somebody who thinks that for any article. I've removed it again. The neutral point of view that you're supposed to follow is that of scholarly sources, and you haven't really got any; the Daily Telegraph is not really a reliable, neutral, source for this kind of thing in the sense that Wikipedia uses.Teapeat (talk) 01:16, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

But it is not just somebody is it. Someone put it in a ToDo list - that was not me. I happen to agree with them, so I add the tag. You just delete the tag. Drkirkby (talk) 03:43, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

That item was added to the To Do list in 2009 -- the article has changed a lot since then. The article is not overly promotional, and one of the apparent negatives of wind, intermittency, is mentioned 26 times! Have removed POV tag. Johnfos (talk) 03:47, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

If something is mentioned 26 times, then its obviously excessive. Why don't you remove 20 or so of them? I note you say "apparent negatives". Clearly it is a negative, but I would accept stating the same thing 26 times is useless. Drkirkby (talk) 03:57, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

I agree, all but one mention of intermittency should be removed except perhaps in the discussion of Germany and Denmark where it should be replaced with Grid energy storage. Because it won't be a problem until about 2025 in most places, at the rate wind is growing. 70.58.13.84 (talk) 04:00, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Not sure where that "26" figure comes from, the words "intermittent" and "intermittency" appear once in the lead and six times in the body text, the rest is TOC, section heading and references. --ELEKHH^T 04:15, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Correction: My word finder is now showing 13 matches for "intermitt". Still a lot. Johnfos (talk) 04:28, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Some of those are in the references, plus section heading, TOC, etc. leaving six in the main body text. But I agree that the section "Variability and intermittency" could provide a more compact and coherent summary. --ELEKHH^T 05:04, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, agree, that the "Variability and intermittency" section should be reworked. But I think the most negative section in the whole article is "Full costs and lobbying", which uses "intermittent" several times. Johnfos (talk) 05:32, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

I have to agree with Drkirkby that there are portions of the article that need to be toned down somewhat in order to alleviate a pro wind power bias. One of the paragraphs I believe is offending is in the lead.

Strike those two sentences. I reread the article and decided that the lead is fine. Still seems to me the article has a bias towards wind power. Maybe simply because some objections are not mentioned or just briefly mentioned. --Aflafla1 (talk) 03:14, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

I find it rather amuzing that since someone agrees with me, that the article has a pro-wind bias, you chose to say they are wrong and strike out their comments! Until very recently, the article said at the top "Per Wikipedia guidelines, this entire Wind Power writeup should be edited to be from a Neutral perspective, rather than its present promotional status." But when I mentioned that fact, that comment is considered old and gets removed. When I add the POV tag, that gets removed. This article is very pro-wind, and any attempt to add balance is removed. Any attempt to even discuss it, gets striken out. Of all the aritcles I've read on Wikipedia, this is the most biased, with its editors determined to keep it that way. Drkirkby (talk)

The article had already undergone a fair amount of revision since the review at the top to remove bias at the time you edited the article. --01:25, 28 March 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aflafla1 (talk • contribs)

The intermittency or variability issue should be confined to a single section. It should present information on what it is and the several ways it is mitigated. The real issue is not intermittency but its predictability. When it is predictable, grid operators can deal with it quite well. The problem, as I understand it, is that they can't predict accurately WHEN a front will move through and causes changes in wind's power output. They only can predict this to within a half hour or so.

One more thing. MISO sometimes uses wind power for load balancing, as it can be curtailed & ramped up as quickly as hydro. Wind farm operators get paid extra for this. --Aflafla1 (talk) 01:30, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

That 'Full costs and lobbying' section probably should go, or at least be reworked and retitled. --Aflafla1 (talk) 01:56, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Have now removed this section. Johnfos (talk) 13:40, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

I've reintroduced it, and retitled it, I think the political aspects are the weakest part of the article. I agree that the section is not very good, but it is referenced, but I think that it needs expanding rather than deleting.Teapeat (talk) 16:58, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Why should the "POV" tag not be added now, and removed when the neutrality disputes have been resolved?

I add the "POV" tag, but it got removed, as apparently I was the only one disputing the neutrality. Now there are several people here disputing the neutrality.

• I (drkirkby) believe it's not neutral.
• One person wrote "I have to agree with Drkirkby that there are portions of the article that need to be toned down somewhat in order to alleviate a pro wind power bias." His comments have been striked out, so I don't actually know who wrote that.
• Another, user, Ipigott, who admits to being "As a strong proponent of new energy sources..", appears to agree the article is not neutral, with comments like "I think the wind power article would be better if it presented more clearly some of the arguments which are critical of its advantages in certain environments."
• The lead section, has not a single argument against the technology, not even mentioning it is a ccontraversial topic, which at least the talk page on Environmental_impact_of_wind_power does.

As such, why should the POV tag not be put on the article now and removed after the issues are resolved? Any random user will get an overly optimistic view of the technology, and have no idea that the neutrality is disputed. I agree the best solution is to make the article more balanced, but until that is done, why should the POV tag not be on the article? I'm personally not going to add it again, as I'll just be accused of geting into an editing war, but someone else should. Drkirkby (talk) 10:06, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Aye, the lede is POV let alone the rest of this shambles. I'll tag it just for the last para of the lede, a blatant piece of soapboxing. Greglocock (talk) 10:44, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for adding the POV tag. I was not suggesting it was only the lead section. I agree most of the rest of the article is POV. If it was just one section, I would have originally tagged that one section, but clearly it is not just one section. Drkirkby (talk) 11:00, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't matter what editors claim, it matters what they can prove. If you have any reliably sourced evidence then give it, otherwise this is just you trying to bias the article to agree with your personal opinion, as opposed to agreeing with the literature, which is the gold standard that Wikipedia holds to.Teapeat (talk) 15:38, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I support removal of the POV tag. There has been a lot of ranting and raving about POV, mainly from Drkirkby, but very little in the way of provision of WP:reliable sources that challenge what is being said in the article. So a POV problem has not been satisfactorily established and we shouldn't have the tag. Johnfos (talk) 21:41, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

This para in the lede is advocacy, not NPOV "Wind power, as an alternative to fossil fuels, is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, and uses little land. In operation, the overall cost per unit of energy produced is similar to the cost for new coal and natural gas installations.[15] The construction of wind farms is not universally welcomed, but any effects on the environment from wind power are generally much less problematic than those of any other power source.[16]".

Ignoring the CO2 used in cosntruction is weaselly, the plentiful sites are not cost effective, the overall costs for unsubsidised wind power are very high per usable kWh. The last sentence is risible marketing speak. Greglocock (talk) 00:43, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

No, the studies linked from the article, produced by for example, by the UK government, show that the cost per kilowatt hour is significantly below that of nuclear and quite comparable to natural gas (all for new plant builds). There is no evidence that 'plentiful sites' are not cost effective- that wouldn't make any sense, wind power, simply doesn't take up a lot of land, although in some places if you have a lot of wind power you will need to upgrade the grid. I'm certain that even if you include the construction emissions wind mills come out way ahead of pretty much everything, the blades and towers just aren't that dirty to build, and the generator itself is going to be pretty comparable to any power plant.Teapeat (talk) 02:16, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

If you're seriously claiming that these paragraphs are seriously misrepresenting the situation, I would invite you to look at the linked government studies.Teapeat (talk) 02:16, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

The thing is that all power plants are long term investments, the subsidies are there to make people invest in power production, rather than investing in writing computer games or whatever, and the subsidies are somewhat more favorable for wind power because of its properties, not out of some misplaced desire to make everyone's electricity much more expensive or to save the whale or something. It's actually one of the cheaper ways to make electricity.Teapeat (talk) 02:16, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Have made some references to GWEC and WWEA explicit, and added an inline "dubious" tag to one statement, but the need for a POV banner on the whole article has not been established. Johnfos (talk) 05:20, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

That paragraph, as it is written was promotional. But what it says is supported. I too have read studies that support the assertions. Wind power is less costly than nuclear and is competitive with coal for new construction. They take up about 1 1/4 acres of land per MW of capacity. I read articles about how nuclear takes up so little land area, but I think they neglect to consider the land taken out of usability by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Statements that wind farms 'fragment habitat' are just that -statements. I've not seen anything that would back them up. I can't see how a service road would fragment habitat. It's not like a well traveled road or highway, which would fragment habitat. --Aflafla1 (talk) 03:00, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Possible disadvantages section?

I think that if we want to make some sensible progress on the issue, the best way to go about it would be to work on developing a section on the possible disadvantages of wind power. I suggest we start with some of the points presented here or here. There are probably many other good sources too. One way to go about it would be to develop a draft in a sandbox. If you wish, I could try to make a start myself and give everyone interested access to the sandbox. Is this a good way to go forward? - Ipigott (talk) 17:04, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I disagree quite strongly. Creating a section on the "disadvantages of wind power" will not help NPOV and will most probably create many other problems. As Wikipedia:Criticism says, "The best approach to incorporating negative criticism into the encyclopedia is to integrate it into the article, in a way that does not disrupt the article's flow. The article should be divided into sections based on topics, timeline, or theme – not viewpoint. Negative criticism should be interwoven throughout the topical or thematic sections". Creating a "Disadvantages" section exacerbates point-of-view problems, and is not encyclopedic. Please follow policy and use an integrated approach. Johnfos (talk) 17:25, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I can certainly go along with this but then we need to agree that additions to the various sections of the article are accepted in good faith and not submerged in more arguments totally in favour of wind power. For a start, though, I would at least be interested in hearing whether you accept that there are a number of factors which should be raised. Several are addressed in the references I gave above. At the moment, the article comes across as the kind of presentation you might expect from Vestas or Siemens rather than an objective presentation of the state of the art. - Ipigott (talk) 18:45, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I can assure you that this article has a lot more content on intermittency (see above discussion), and a lot less on things like job creation, than you might expect from Vestas or Siemens.

I see where you have said above:

In most cases, wind power has strong advantages over traditional sources of energy. In some cases, though, its detrimental environmental effects (noise, unsightliness of the turbines, comparative advantages of, for example, solar or other developing sources) are important enough to be taken into account. In particular, the appropriate siting of wind farms is a key criterion. The need for far better storage systems is also a factor to be taken more seriously into account.

Most of these are environmental issues. Please bear in mind that we already have an article on Environmental impact of wind power, with a summary from that article and link provided here, per WP:Summary style. This is the way we do things when a main article becomes too long -- we split off sub-articles leaving a summary and link here.

With regard to storage, utilities install a “reserve margin” of roughly 15% extra capacity spinning ready for instant use, to cope with failures of conventional plants. So no extra backup is needed for wind power intermittency, as there is already enough spinning reserve in the system.

You may also be interested in an article by Mark Z. Jacobson, which discusses the integration of various renewables:

"Because the wind blows during stormy conditions when the sun does not shine and the sun often shines on calm days with little wind, combining wind and solar can go a long way toward meeting demand, especially when geothermal provides a steady base and hydroelectric can be called on to fill in the gaps". – Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi. Scientific American, November 2009, p. 43.

-- Johnfos (talk) 19:50, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I think you would be much better off finding some reliable sources, and ensuring that we've accurately represented them in the article.Teapeat (talk) 20:50, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I can go along with the sandbox idea, but Johnfos is right in not wanting to create a separate section for the disadvantages. --Aflafla1 (talk) 06:40, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

UK Government view

I've stuck some information about the UK government view, and in particular the climbdown of the prime minister. I have just posted inline links for now, as I expect it will get deleted, but if it remains there for 48 hours, I'll take the trouble to make the references better. Drkirkby (talk) 18:23, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

I've reverted it. This was a classic example of synthesis to promote a specific point of view. Please do not do so again. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 19:10, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

And again it's a parochial focus on the UK, which is something of a bit-part player in wind. The UK is (at time of writing) the world-leader in offshore wind, but that's a small fraction of all installed wind. Ernestfax^Talk 08:47, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Worldwide Wind power capacity and production charts

Hi all: in the 'Wind power capacity and production' section are two excellent, highly useful charts:

• Top 10 countries by nameplate windpower capacity (left side)
• Top 10 EU countries by windpower electricity production (right side)

The obvious disconnect is that the first chart to the left reflects countries worldwide, while the second chart to the right reflects only EU countries, and should actually be placed in Wind power in the European Union, since this article reflects wind power in general worldwide. Unless there are good reasons not to, I'll convert the second chart on the right side to reflect countries worldwide instead on only countries in the EU. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 12:49, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done Unfortunately the 14th edition of Observ'ER's (L’Observatoire des énergies renouvelables) Worldwide Electricity Production From Renewable Energy Sources Inventory has not yet been released for 2012, so the figures supplied are for 2010, not 2011. Additionally, the IEA charges €400 (minimum) for access to their current basic data sets (at www.iea.org/stats), so they are inaccessible to those on a limited budget. If anyone knows of a good source for 2011 tabulated wind production data worldwide, please advise us. The previous 'Top 10 EU Countries' wind production table has been moved to the Wind power in the European Union article. HarryZilber (talk) 20:18, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Wind Watch and Wind Action

These are wind power opposition groups that we hear about sometimes. If they are notable, then they should have an article on WP... Johnfos (talk) 16:10, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

There are those who believe, despite opinion surveys to the contrary, that there are a lot of active anti-wind groups. Please start articles on the most notable groups. I'm not talking about heritage and other groups which have much larger concerns, but dedicated groups specifically against wind power, in the same way that we have anti-nuclear groups specifically against nuclear power. Johnfos (talk) 14:38, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't know a lot about these groups (I'm not a member of any of them), but even if I did, I suspect it would be better to spend some time sorting this article out first. The main article deserves more attention. Drkirkby (talk) 00:25, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Neglected aspects of wind power

Wind turbines at Findhorn Ecovillage make the community a net exporter of electricity.

Thanet Wind Farm, UK

Visitor kiosk at Hancock County Wind Energy Center in Iowa

Vestas V27 at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio

As I've been writing in the sections above it has struck me that there are several important aspects of wind power that we hear little about in the media. More particularly, some of these are not adequately covered yet in this article, or on WP more generally, but I have collected together a few wikilinks that might be helpful for those who are interested.

Public opinion surveys

Public opinion surveys around the globe have shown high levels of public support and social acceptance of wind power.

• Wind power in the European Union#Public opinion
• Wind power in Canada#Public opinion
• Wind power in Scotland#Public opinion

-- Johnfos (talk) 18:41, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• Some US polling data (search "wind"): [21]--E8 (talk) 03:12, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Community wind energy

Many communities around the globe are financing and building their own wind farms, see:

• Community wind energy
• Wind power in Denmark#Wind turbine cooperatives
• Wind power in Scotland#Community ownership
• Native Wind

Offshore wind power

Especially in Europe, offshore wind power is a growth industry, see:

• Offshore wind power
• List of offshore wind farms
• Lists of offshore wind farms by country
• List of offshore wind farms in the United Kingdom
• List of offshore wind farms in Denmark
• Walney Wind Farm
• Harland and Wolff

Wind farms as tourist attractions

Some wind farms have become tourist attractions, including several in Canada. The Whitelee Wind Farm Visitor Centre in Scotland has an exhibition room, a learning hub, a café with a viewing deck and also a shop. It is run by the Glasgow Science Centre.

-- Johnfos (talk) 18:41, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• See Wind_turbines_on_public_display for more.--E8 (talk) 03:08, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I've been asked to comment

Hello all. I've been asked to comment in this discussion of Wind power. How can I help?Jobberone (talk) 00:00, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure we need a mediator at this stage but if you look at the previous three or four sections on this page, you'll see that at least one editor feels that the article is still too promotional and is upset that several of the changes he has been making have been reverted. - Ipigott (talk) 16:34, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

There appears to be more than one user on each side of the equation so I'm not certain its just one user. I'm not really a mediator but just another editor who has no dog in this fight. Who asked for someone to comment? If they or no one else desires comment then I will withdraw. Thanks.Jobberone (talk) 21:21, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Dr Kirby asked for the comment. His request is immediately below the request box.--E8 (talk) 21:38, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I would certainly like you to comment. DrKirby tried to add a bit of skepticism to the article about the case for wind power and this led to a something of an edit war from 22 March onwards. This attracted my attention and I commented that the article did tend to lean towards support for wind power - see discussion entitled 'Is the article overly promotional' above. I suggested that, in the UK in particular, there seemed to by a weakening of enthusiasm for more wind farms but a number of editors have weighed in saying that the UK is only a bit player and therefore the situation there is not something that is relevant to this article. I don't agree with that view and feel that something should be included in the 'Community' section. However, I don't feel like I want to take the time to add anything as it will probably be reverted as irrelevant as there seems to be some hostility to saying anything negative about the case for wind power in the article unless it's of the form 'some say A but it's not really valid because of B'. Richerman (talk) 22:04, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Ok. I would agree that it is a little biased. I think the style could be more neutral. The references need to be a little more balanced. The problems associated with wind power need more weight. The science behind harnessing wind needs more exposure. The problems associated with harnessing the wind needs expanding to explain some concerns. Some discussion of the future of energy needs and use and its associated problems can be worked into the article. The article is at times so rosy it does appear promotional. IOWs the other side of the coin needs to be heard a little more without giving it too much weight. And the article needs expanding. I think this article is very important and can easily be improved with more cooperation. Give them all the ins and outs of wind energy in a balanced and neutral way. I'm going to stay away from specifics for now but those wanting more neutrality need to work at it some and those who object to that need to to find neutral 3rd source data to balance that. Also I would ask until further discussion editors on both sides refrain from reverting changes and all try to reach compromise and agreement before altering the balance of the article. Cheers.Jobberone (talk) 23:26, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

That seems to be a very fair summary to me - thanks for your input. Richerman (talk) 23:40, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

This assessment is full of flowery generalisations, with not a single citation or wikilink to support what is being said. Johnfos (talk) 01:50, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I really try to stay objective in my comments as part of the RfC. In fact I try very hard to always be fair and neutral when I edit. I really don't have a side in this topic. Again I encourage all to advance the article presenting all the issues. This is an encyclopedia and readers deserve to hear all the issues, how those issues developed and perhaps how they will be solved. Expand and improve the article. There is no need to fight about what is included. If done in a fair and balanced way most readers will weigh things appropriately. Solar and wind conversion to energy will be about as friendly to man and the earth as we can get. I hope some will work on the problem of energy use and production as to how it relates now and in the future to the overall balance of heat on earth. To User:Johnfos, I shouldn't have to spoon feed you or anyone else here what the problems are. I assume all here are educated and reasonable editors who wish Wikipedia to be as best as it can be. Surely you can take some objective input and look at the examples I've cited and work to improve the article with your own balanced input. Good luck!Jobberone (talk) 12:04, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

There is a good NPOV balance between advantages and disadvantages of wind power which is integrated throughout the article, which is the way it should be. One of the major negatives, intermittency, gets wide coverage, and my word finder shows 13 matches for "intermitt", which is a lot. In terms of environmental/aesthetic issues, we already have an article on Environmental impact of wind power, with a summary from that article and link provided here, per WP:Summary style. So, no, the article is not overly promotional and it is not POV either. Johnfos (talk) 14:24, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I have heard you and I respect your opinion. The problem is yours is not the only opinion. Wikipedia is an open document and as such you're going to hear a lot of opinions. While I'd certainly love to impose my will on others at times, it just won't work that way. For the encyclopedia to work well we must all be open to suggestions. My point is to be a good encyclopedia we need to include all the data of all sides of each issue if there is any and present it in a balanced way. To be specific about one thing, the possible environmental consequences to wind turbines seems to be small and should stay that way in the foreseeable future. There is some concern that it could become a problem. That can be presented in a balanced way giving it the weight it deserves. To quote: "Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them." Dissenting opinions and data should be presented in a verifiable manner. I would suggest all sides sit down and find a way to edit this article compromising as necessary.Jobberone (talk) 15:21, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Eureka! You've finally made a specific comment! You said: "To be specific about one thing, the possible environmental consequences to wind turbines seems to be small and should stay that way in the foreseeable future. There is some concern that it could become a problem". The reality of course is that offshore wind power is an expanding industry, which is revitalising old shipyards such as Harland and Wolff, and that any environmental/ aesthetic/ siting problems are actually less than with onshore wind. Johnfos (talk) 15:33, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I think you and others will benefit more from a healthy discussion of the issues including specifics without involving me. I am not going to contribute to the article so I can stay neutral. If enough people perhaps even one stay entrenched in the belief the article can only be authored in one specific way then little progress will be made. Again I encourage all to participate in benefiting the article. Cheers!Jobberone (talk) 17:10, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

This section reads like a minority report from those who are unwilling or unable to accept the findings of the RfC above. The RfC presents a consensus view that the article is neutral and does not need a POV tag. Johnfos (talk) 01:50, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

This section is part of the RfC as User:Jobberone was randomly chosen to comment by a bot. I don't agree that the article is neutral, Dr.Kirby doesn't agree and now User:Jobberone doesn't agree, so obviously there is no consensus. There are no 'findings' from the RfC - it's only it has only been running for 8 days and it's not a vote anyway. Perhaps Jobberone would like to change the heading of this section to bold to make it clear it's part of the RfC rather than have a new section. Richerman (talk) 09:37, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Richerman, I said this to you in the RfC above, and never received a reply: 'I think you've been taken in by sensationalist and one-sided media coverage. I read something recently which said: "There is much stronger public support for wind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest, because a vocal minority who oppose wind farms secure the majority of media and political attention". [22] And I agree with that. In Scotland, surveys show there is a history of high levels of community acceptance and strong support for wind power, with much support from those who lived closest to the wind farms, see Wind power in Scotland#Public opinion'. Johnfos (talk) 14:24, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

A note on process: Jobberone made no mention of the RfC when he started this section and has taken on the role of de-facto mediator outside the RfC. As I've said above, this section reads like a minority report from those who are unwilling or unable to accept the findings of the RfC above. The RfC presents a consensus view that the article is neutral and does not need a POV tag. Johnfos (talk) 14:30, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Joberrone said they had been asked to comment and a quick look at his/her talk page showed that they had been asked by a bot to comment. Repeating exactly what you've said three paragraphs above doesn't make it true - there is no consensus yet. I've never suggested that the article needs a a POV tag, if anything it needs a neutrality tag, but I'd much rather try and sort out the problems than start winding people up by adding tags. You seem to have the opinion that anyone who says the article is lacking neutrality must be some kind of anti wind farm campaigner - I can assure you I'm not. I'm all for renewable energy but I can see that any energy production process comes with its own problems. As for the point you made about there being much stronger public support for wind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest, you then give a citation for a survey of attitudes to nine wind farms in NSW, Victoria and South Australia - what's that got to do with attitudes in the UK? Richerman (talk) 15:37, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I accept that Joberrone was asked by a bot to comment on the RfC, but instead he came in and started his own discussion section and didn't mentioned the RfC, and took on the role of mediator. I am sorry about repeating myself at times, but no one has responded to many of the substantive issues raised. These are not just my opinions -- I always try to provide a citation of wikilink or two to support what is being said. When I saw this edit I felt you were an anti-wind campaigner. Pretty extreme stuff, when you had already been told that the best place to raise local UK concerns is in the individual wind farm article or in Wind power in the United Kingdom. With respect to "much stronger public support for wind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest", please see the many favourable public opinion surveys conducted internationally. Here are some from Canada [23] [24] [25]. Please also see the section below: I invite you to start articles on anti-wind groups such as Wind Action and Wind Watch to demonstrate that they are notable, and to describe their views. Johnfos (talk) 16:21, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

My last comment for awhile to give time for all to participate and think. See the second paragraph where I specially said I was not a mediator but a fellow editor. The point of getting a comment is for that editor to try and get all sides to move towards improving the article and not take sides. I'm not here to create dissension but to facilitate and suggest. I would ask all to assume good faith and work with each other. Good luck!Jobberone (talk) 17:35, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

All I did was expand a quotation that was already there because I didn't feel that it really represented what was said. When the National Trust Director General says "It provides a clear indication that our cultural heritage is at great risk from inappropriately sited wind turbines and wind farms" it's a lot more than a local issue. I don't see what's extreme about quoting the opinions of the Director General of the British National Trust. If you look back at my earlier comments you will see that I said "in the UK" there seems to be a weakening of support for wind farms. For all I know there may be a specific set of circumstances unique to the UK that are responsible for that. As for beginning articles on the anti wind groups why should I? - I'm really not interested in doing that. However, whether or not the are notable, the fact that 106 MPs wrote to the British Prime Minister, urging cuts in public subsidies to UK wind farms certainly is notable and I will add something about that. MP's views reflect the issues of their constituents. They may or may not have a point or but we're here to report, not to make judgements. Richerman (talk) 18:27, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I guess you don't understand that renewable energy is "coming of age" as the International Energy Agency put it recently, see [26]. The international trend is that wind power costs are coming down due to economies of scale and fewer subsidies are needed. A more specific response to the UK MPs letter, from David Cameron, is here. Cameron suggested cutting subsidies to onshore wind by 10% as building costs drop, but mounted a strong defence of the government's plans to build wind farms in the UK, saying he has sympathy with local residents' concerns, but he insists there are "perfectly hard-headed reasons" for building more on-shore wind farms, as wind power plays a role in a balanced UK electricity mix. All very interesting but again we just don't have the space in this overview article for this sort of debate, in my view. Again I suggest that you put this sort of thing in Wind power in the United Kingdom... You ask "Why should I begin articles on anti-wind groups?" The simple answer is because you are pushing an anti-wind perspective, over and over again... Johnfos (talk) 22:55, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

I am sick of saying this - I am not pushing the anti-wind perspective, I am trying to add a bit of balance to the article. 106 British MPs asked for subsidies to be cut because they thought that wind farms were ineffecient. There is room for a couple of lines on that sort of controversy in this article and more in the the UK article. It is evidence that wind energy production is controversial and not as universally accepted as this article would lead you to believe. Richerman (talk) 09:50, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

There is balance in the article, which says:

• "Large-scale implementation of wind energy production will however need to address concerns related to siting, aesthetic and environmental factors, and land availability".
• "In the UK, the National Trust has expressed opposition to plans for a wind farm near Lyveden New Bield, a 17th Century lodge in Northamptonshire, believing it would upset the appeal of one of the finest Elizabethan gardens still in existence".
• "Wind turbines such as these, in Cumbria, England, have been opposed for a number of reasons, including aesthetics, by some sectors of the population".

And then there is a link to Renewable energy debate#Community debate about wind farms which provides further details.

I accept that you are not anti-wind, if you say so, but have pointed out that you are very quick to pick up on sensationalist and one-sided media articles, and ignore public opinion surveys. With regard to the letter from the British MPS, I think you and Dr Kirkby have missed the basic point that the letter is only about onshore wind farms, and there is no questioning of the fast-growing offshore wind farm industry as far as I can see. And there is an important rebuff from David Cameron, which you failed to mention. Etc.

I have also pointed out that the so-called controversy about wind power pales into insignificance when compared with that of nuclear power, see anti-nuclear movement, anti-nuclear protests, and anti-nuclear groups. We don't even seem able to find a dedicated anti-wind group that is notable enough to write an article about. Johnfos (talk) 11:21, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Sensationalist? The only thing I have added to the article recently was to expand the quotation about Lyveden New Bield proposal to show that it was much more than concern about a local issue but you've seen fit to revert that. I've not added anything about the letter from the MPs yet and obviously I would put in the response from the PM but you've already argued that it would then be too long and give too much weight to the story. There seems to be a lot of goalpost moving in your arguments. As for your point about the anti-wind groups, I've never suggested that there was the same level of opposition as there is to nuclear power, only that there is a weakening of support. Richerman (talk) 19:16, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, sensationalist -- you have been very quick to pick up on sensationalist and one-sided media articles, and ignore public opinion surveys. Recent public opinion surveys about wind power at both the EU and the country level shows that wind energy, being a clean and renewable energy source, is traditionally linked to very strong and stable levels of public support. About 80 per cent of EU citizens support wind power. Yet you seem to be ignoring this type of more reliable and sobre analysis. There is no goalpost moving in my arguments -- If you go back through my posts you will see that I have been quite consistent with my position from the start, adding wikilinks and citations to support what I've said, where I can. Johnfos (talk) 20:52, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

You've certainly been consistent with ignoring most what I've said, repeating your arguments as if I didn't get them the first time and insulting my intelligence by supplying links to concepts like renewable energy in case I didn't understand them. We're obviously not going to agree and I'm tired of going round in circles so I'm done with this discussion. Richerman (talk) 21:49, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I haven't ignored your suggestions, but have said that most of them fit better into other articles. One minute your saying I'm moving the goalposts and the next you're saying I'm repeating my arguments -- surely I can't be doing both? I can see you're a good WP editor, but honestly don't think that you have a good understanding of renewable energy commercialization, and I think you are often missing the bigger picture. Johnfos (talk) 22:42, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi, it was me that requested someone else looked at the page and comment, as I and several other editors have felt the article is overly promotional. The issues I see are:

• The items included are selectively chosen. For example, currently the article has the comment "Over the course of a day, 31 October, 2010, Portugal had a penetration level of 61%." I have seen a similar statistic, which shows that on one day in Norway, which uses wind power extensively, there was a day when wind contributed only 1% of the power. But only one side is shown. I expect if I added the Norweigen statistic, it would get removed.
• The volume of material on the benefits of the technology are given excessive space, and in more prominent positions than the downsides of the technology.
• The lead in particular hardly mentions the downsides. Only the last two sentances mention any of the problems of wind power, and even them play down the problems. Yet there are a total of around 17 sentences in the lead section.
• I've had numerous edits reversed. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wind_power&diff=484307931&oldid=484307160 where my edits which removed items marked as needing citation for months, had been removed. Perhaps the statement Small wind turbines for lighting of isolated rural buildings were widespread in the first part of the 20th century. is true, perhaps it is not. It was marked as needing a citation for many months by someone else. Nobody any any reference, so I removed it. But of course my edit was reversed, and now I see it has been reversed again.
• The sources cited are usually very pro-wind groups, with very little in peer reviewed journals.
• I think it was Johnfos, who said the fact 106 UK MPs wrote to the PM should not go into the article, as it was specific to the UK. Yet he seems keen to add UK wind farms which are tourist attractions.
• I think it is fair to say that wind power is a controversial topic, but I was not permitted to add the word controversial.

In essence, I dispute the neutrality of the article, and feel any attempt to present an opposing view gets removed, or made to appear far less significant than it is. Drkirkby (talk) 00:21, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

• I think the issue is, how "significant" is the position. Thus far, you shown that it's an issue in a few locations within a (relatively small) region. Where is the data? You've said it yourself, "The onus must be on the person that writes something to provide verifiable evidence It it can't be verified, it should not be in Wikipedia." All polling data I've viewed indicates that wind power is widely accepted. NIMBY cases exist, but they're not a specific objection to wind power, they're an objection to change - other projects would face the same resistance.--E8 (talk) 03:29, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I've said before, it is difficult to find neutral sources on wind power. I could point to hundred of anti-wind groups, but these groups are not writing in peer reviewed journals. I did see a claim by one of the two main pro-wind groups (GWEC or WWEA, I forget which), that the UK is hampering wind development with planning permission approval rates of only 28%. But even if I could be bothered to look that up, I would be quoting a source which I've already said I don't believe can be trusted. I've got no reason to dispute that figure, but I don't trust the source of it. My personal opinion of the situation in the UK is:

* A lot (perhaps the majority of people) think wind power is good, though that number is decreasing.

* Most people don't appreciate the big subsidies given to wind - they see it as free electricity, so good.

* When a wind turbine is proposed around people, they often object (hence the hundreds of anti wind farm web sites). This is clearly a case of NIMBY

* Whilst the NIMBY is undoubtedly a factor, the sheer number of wind turbines needed to produce a reasonable amount of power means that it annoys a lot of people. Yes, they are local issues, but when it starts affecting a lot of groups of people, it starts becoming a national problem.

I'd agree the local objections are probably no worst than for coal or gas, and perhaps less than nuclear. But we don't need thousands of nuclear power stations around the country to provide enough electricity. But we do need thousands of wind farms.

I happen to live near Bradwell in Essex. There is a nuclear power station there, which is now being decommissioned. I did not live here when it was erected, but I can imagine there were numerous protests about it. I would imagine getting permission to build that nuclear power plant took years. But one of the main differences between wind and nuclear power is the sheer number of installations required. They tend to be visible over large distances, as they are generally mounted high. So whilst the article says they take up very little land, and cows can graze next to them, it conveniently overlooks the fact they can be seen from a large distance. But as I say, it's hard to get hard facts on a lot of these things. The anti-wind groups are not exactly unbiased, and neither are the GWEC or WWEA. Drkirkby (talk) 00:29, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• "though that number is decreasing" <= citation needed. Global please.
• "most people don't appreciate ... subsidies" <= citation needed. Global please.
• NIMBY - we have references to show this - so no objection there.
• Erh? How do you come to this conclusion? Do you have any references that state that this is the case? How about once the windfarms are installed - how do people react? Is the opposition then still increasing? There seems to be a lot of "i presume" "i think" without actual backing in WP:RS's here.

You are presenting your personal views here (WP:POV,WP:OR). That is 100% irrelevant - what is needed is references - and references that address Wind Power as a generic issue - not as a local/regional/national issue. Britain is not a very large part of the world, nor is it particularly interesting in the context of Wind Power, and it seems that Britain is your focus. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 00:35, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

No, they are specific objections because not all technologies are as visible as wind power, wind power goes up on hills in full view, because that's where the wind is.Teapeat (talk) 04:08, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

But most people don't find them to be eye-sores, nor are they ridiculously noisy, and I just added data supporting your position to the article, referenced, and it has just been arbitrarily removed out of hand.Teapeat (talk) 04:08, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Other sources usually considered to be neutral also mention this, but this article, no.Teapeat (talk) 04:08, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

My main problem here is: We don't seem to see generic references given to these issues, which means that we have absolutely no idea as to the significance. When you say something about "visibility", then please reference some general reliable sources that address this "problem" (i assume it is - since you say so), in the context of Wind Power globally. We know that there is opposition locally/regionally/nationally (in some countries), what we don't know (since no one is presenting references to show it), is how widespread this sentiment is, and what amount that is outside the pure NIMBY effect. And we need to know to address it otherwise we're doing original research (specifically synthesis. Please address this! --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 00:41, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

• I didn't think the article was being very unbalanced, just a bit, but it would sort itself out,but I've come to the conclusion that it is, and it's consistent with being deliberately being held in that state, and that Jobberone is right. I now have great reservations specifically about johnfos's editing of this article; he's arbitrarily reverting other people's edits.Teapeat (talk) 04:08, 2 April 2012 (UTC)