#UNRELIABLES Report Card : Actual Electricity Generated From Wind Farms Falls Well Short Of Claimed Output
Posted: April 18, 2018 Filed under: Australia, Climatism, Empirical Evidence, Energy Poverty, Fact Check, Failed Green Schemes, Government Grants/Funding, Green Agenda, Green Energy, infrasound, Renewables, Unreliables, Wind Farms, Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS) | Tags: AGL, Australian Energy Council, capacity factor, carbon dioxide emissions, climate, Climate Change, Energy, Energy Poverty, Fuel Poverty, Global Warming, Green Energy Failure, Macarthur Wind Farm, NEM, Oaklands Hill Wind Farm, Renewable energy, RET, unreliables, wind, Wind Energy, Wind Farms, wind power 3 Comments“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
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THE question of efficiency is critical to any informed discussion of wind energy. Wind turbines produce less energy than their “maximum capacity” rating would have us believe. Due to the fluctuation of wind currents—not exactly a novel discovery—turbines actually produce around 26.9 percent of the energy they could in theory generate. This is known as their “capacity factor.” By contrast, conventional power plants tend to have a capacity factor of 40 to 80 percent. This has one obvious ramification: Wind farms are less efficient and cost-effective than non-renewable sources of energy.
ALTHOUGH this conclusion is hardly shocking, the unpredictability of wind power presents a much more serious problem. Because wind power can never be completely reliable, we will always need other, more reliable forms of energy to serve as a backup for “wind reliant” buildings and infrastructure. (Wind Farms: Not So Green | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson)
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THE Australian’s Sid Maher with the 2017 wind production report card that reaffirms the fact that industrial wind turbines remain firmly positioned as mere symbolic ‘energy’ icons to the folly of collective climate change insanity…
Claimed wind farm generation figures fall well short of actuals
Unfavourable winds appear to have clipped the wings of the wind farms in the national electricity market, with their actual power production coming in about 11 per cent below their claimed production capacity in the year to July 2017.
Only four wind farms connected to the NEM that services Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia exceeded their claimed capacity in 2016-17.
Production figures released by the Clean Energy Regulator show AGL’s Macarthur Wind Farm in Victoria produced 894,077 MWh compared with a claimed capacity of 1.29 million MWh for the financial year.
AGL’s Oaklands Hill Wind Farm, also in Victoria, produced 170,182 MWh compared with a claimed capacity of 205,422MWh, a shortfall of 35,240MWh, while its Wattle Point Wind Farm in South Australia produced 233,053MWh compared with a claimed capacity of 360,000MWh, a shortfall of 126,947 MWh in the period.
“Performance in FY2017 was primarily affected by planned outages at Macarthur, and unfavourable wind for all farms,’’ AGL said.
The shortfall in generation by wind farms comes amid Greens attacks on the reliability of coal-fired generation. Late last year, Greens climate change spokesman Adam Bandt branded coal “unreliable’’ and said coal-fired stations struggled in the heat.
Research by the Australian Energy Council said coal-fired power stations had the highest capacity factor in all states except Tasmania and the Northern Territory, where the primary generation was from hydro and gas-fired plants.
The capacity factor of a power station is the electricity produced represented as a percentage of the theoretical maximum a plant could produce if it ran at maximum output 24 hours a day for a full year.
The Australian Energy Council research, published in November, showed the capacity factor of coal ranged from 56 per cent in Western Australia to 81 per cent in Victoria in the 2015-16 year. The capacity factor of wind farms ranged from 30 per cent in Victoria to 37 per cent in Tasmania.
The UK’s Moray East Offshore Windfarm [MEOW] claims it will power 950,000 UK homes. But wind turbine performance inexorably declines at 1.6% per annum.
By year 25 of its [hoped-for] 25 year lifespan, it will only be capable of powering 645,000 homes.
Wind power companies never mention this kind of issue to the general public or to our politicians and it makes you suspect that investors aren’t told either:
https://smart-and-fabb.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/moray-east-offshore-windfarm-are.html?view=sidebar
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