Just how dirty is wind power?
There are more reasons to question the efficacy of windmill power generation that just the fact turbines might interfere with Nellis Air Force Range training and testing.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future," reports that wind not only requires huge subsidies, but it also doesn’t do much for reducing the carbon output of the power industry.
As we’ve pointed out before, Bryce notes wind is intermittent and requires convention gas or coal plants to be on standby. But he compares these standby sources of power to the family auto, which is more efficient and cleaner when traveling at a constant speed but less so when it starts and stops.
“Because wind blows intermittently, electric utilities must either keep their conventional power plants running all the time to make sure the lights don't go dark, or continually ramp up and down the output from conventional coal- or gas-fired generators (called 'cycling'),” Bryce writes. “But coal-fired and gas-fired generators are designed to run continuously, and if they don't, fuel consumption and emissions generally increase. A car analogy helps explain: An automobile that operates at a constant speed — say, 55 miles per hour — will have better fuel efficiency, and emit less pollution per mile traveled, than one that is stuck in stop-and-go traffic.”
Reliance on wind can actually lead to an increase in carbon output, he says.
On those subsidies, Bryce says, “The federal government provides a production tax credit of $0.022 for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by wind. That amounts to $6.44 per million BTU of energy produced. In 2008, however, the EIA reported subsidies to oil and gas totaled $1.9 billion per year, or about $0.03 per million BTU of energy produced. Wind subsidies are more than 200 times as great as those given to oil and gas on the basis of per-unit-of-energy produced.”
Another reason for the Air Force and ratepayers to balk at wind turbines.
